


The Eight Lives of Ianto Jones

by claritylore



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alien Planet, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Universe - Everybody Lives, And YOU Get a Happy Ending, Angst, Eighth Doctor Era, Eighth Doctor is the War Doctor, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Fix-It: s02e13 Exit Wounds (Torchwood), Except for you Captain John - you get an alien STD, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Mild Gore, Psychological Torture, Regeneration (Doctor Who), Time Agency, Time Agent Ianto Jones, Time Travel, Time War (Doctor Who), Training, Undead Owen Harper, Wrongful Imprisonment, YOU ALL Get a Happy Ending!, YOU Get a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-19 07:21:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29871159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claritylore/pseuds/claritylore
Summary: A split second misjudgement takes Ianto's life off in a completely different direction, as he ends up thrown through time and space with Captain John and runs into Jack's brother, Gray.Eye Candy, Companion, Time Agent..... after centuries of trying find his way home, who is the real Ianto Jones anyway?
Relationships: Gwen Cooper/Rhys Williams, Ianto Jones/Eighth Doctor (friendship), Jack Harkness/Gwen Cooper (mentioned), Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness/John Hart (Past), Owen Harper/Toshiko Sato (one sided)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 38





	1. Eye Candy

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on an older fic from 2007, completely rewritten and expanded upon. It's not canon-complaint to Doctor Who as it was written before the War Doctor storyline was a thing, but does work as an alternative Season 2 of Torchwood.

It was a hard landing, one which winded Ianto completely and left him gasping for breath.

Captain John was lying on the ground beside him, also fighting to breathe in the haze of disturbed dust around them. He turned his head to Ianto with a slightly quizzical, slightly annoyed look. "What the _hell_ was that, Eye Candy?"

Ianto coughed and fought to sit up, blinking his eyes in the unexpected daylight. Moments ago he had been standing on a rooftop in Wales, at night. Now he was... not.

"Where are we?" Ianto asked, and then pointedly glared at the man lying next to him. "What did you do?"

"What did _I_ do? You're the one who grabbed me!" Captain John pushed himself up to his feet with a groan and then leaned on his knees to cough. He looked at his Time Agency wristband, shaking his head. "Well, at least you didn't mess up the coordinates. Seriously, what was that all about?"

Ianto's heart hammered as he remembered... he'd seen how Captain John stepped towards Jack, reaching for him, and he'd seen danger. This man was a time traveller, almost certainly another agent from the future, just like Jack, and he'd also known how they traveled. Captain John's intentions had seemed obvious to Ianto, and naturally he had run to intervene and knock Jack out of the way before Captain John could do what he was obviously planning to do.

Somehow, he must have brushed against the wristband that Captain John was using... and he'd been caught in the beam with him as it activated.

"You were going to take Jack-" he growled.

Captain John snorted a cynical laugh at that. "Is that what you think?" He offered a hand to him to help him up, but Ianto just glared and made a point of finding his own way onto his feet. "It was just going to be a kiss goodbye, Eye Candy. For old time's sake. Didn't peg you for the jealous type," he mocked.

Ianto hid his grimace by turning away from John under the pretext of likewise dusting himself off, though he was pretty sure his suit was ruined anyway. The accusation stung for some reason. Sure, Jack had just asked him out on a date, but that was all. Technically there actually wasn’t anything between them. Not anymore.

That had all ended when Jack left. And the idea of him disappearing _again_ , so soon after coming back, well... Ianto supposed that might have made him overreact. Possibly.

"And I didn't even get to deliver my punch line," Captain John complained. "It was a doozy too. The look on his face would have been... _something_."

Ianto was no longer listening to him. He was looking around at their distinctly non-Cardiff surroundings, trying to persuade himself not to panic.

This place was a landscape of orange hills and rocks, pockmarked with craters and smoking bits of rubble for as far as the eye could see. The sky had two blue planets hanging in it, one huge and bright, the other much smaller, with a distant sun behind them.

Not earth. _Not earth!_

"Where are we?" Ianto asked, not quite able to keep the hysteria rising in his throat from his voice.

"The next destination that was pre-programmed in." Captain John scurried aside and ran up some rocks nearby to the summit, and Ianto reluctantly ran up after him. "This is the Bedlam Outpost. Until recently, this moon was crawling with a species called the Bane," he said, holding his hand out as if making an introduction. "We’re about two days after the fall of their civilisation. Actually, we’re looking at the dust settling from a hundred years of intergalactic war."

Ianto surveyed the chaos ahead and shrugged. ‘Right, well. Nice as this is, you're going to need to take me back now.’

"Nope. No way back." John gave out a mean snort. "Sorry, mate."

"What? Why-"

"I can’t go back there again. Not exactly. The nearest I could safely do without risk of crossing my timeline would be three months on. Two absolute minimum."

Ianto's teeth set hard and he involuntarily clenched his fists a few times, actively having to stop himself from lashing out. "If that’s the best you can do, I'll take it. Send me back."

Captain John said nothing. Instead he leapt down off the rocks to the other side of where they had landed and started off walking across the barren wasteland, casually kicking through some small wisps of purple foliage as he did like he hadn't a care in the world.

"Hey!" Ianto yelled after him, and then quickly leapt down and ran after him in pursuit. He grabbed Captain John by the shoulder and span him around. "Hey, I told you to send me back!"

"Hands off the merchandise," John said, pushing him off and straightening his jacket. "No chance, Eye Candy. Because if I take you back now, I won’t be able to come back here at the right time and you have no idea what I had to go through to get the intel for this mission."

"Mission? What mission?"

" _That_ was my punchline. It was a bloody good one too until you ruined it." Captain John shook his head as he continued along, determined to keep going. "Now stay here or come with me, I don't care either way. But if you're coming, we need to get a move on if we're going to get to the prison fortress in time.’ He paused, but only to look Ianto up and down, lecherously. "Hmm, you can be my pretty little valet. Come valet, come."

He set off once again only to find all five foot eleven of pretty little valet leaping onto him from behind and wrestling him to the ground in an attempt to get his wristband off him. When at last it was pulled away, John lay back on his elbows and laughed at Ianto’s frantic attempts to operate it. 

"That won’t work, you know."

"Yes it will. It has to." He had to get home. To Torchwood. To Jack. He just _had_ to.

"It’s bonded to my DNA. It can’t be used unless it's on me. All time rift manipulators are made that way, genius. It's a Time Agency standard."

With a heavy sigh, Ianto got to his feet and pushed the wristband back in John’s face. "Then put it back on and send me back." When he got no response, he pressed it even harder. "Do it!"

Captain John grabbed it back and made a show of sliding it onto his wrist. But instead of programming in anything, he sneakily threw dust in Ianto's face and used the moment to get back onto his feet. "Like I said, I have a mission and it’s somewhat time sensitive," he said, walking backwards away from him. "Don't want to be late."

Once again, Ianto scurried onto his feet too and ran after him. This time he took up position beside him and kept pace. "Please," he tried, though he hated to do it. "I need to go home."

"If you quit slowing me down then maybe, after this is done - if you're a _very_ good boy - I'll consider it. Alright, Eye Candy?"

Ianto gave him a curt nod, his lips pressed tightly together. He really didn't have any other option. He knew that he was going to have try and get Captain John on his side if he had any chance of ever getting home. "Fine," Ianto sighed. "What's the mission?"

"I’ll explain on the way."

After a moment, Ianto asked, "How can I trust you?"

"Obviously you can't," the Captain scoffed, "But look, this one’s for Jack, alright? Trust me, he’ll be grateful."

Ianto gave him a long, assessing stare as they continued to walk along at a fast pace. He was trying to figure out if Captain John was sincere but, ultimately, he just couldn't tell. "I'll help you," he said, and added, 'If you _promise_ you’ll take me home afterwards."

John just snorted as if he was amused. "Sure," he drawled.

Ianto didn't find that particularly reassuring, or convincing, but he knew in his heart of hearts that there was very little he could do about it. He had to just stick with him and hope it would work out. "So what are we doing?" he asked, swallowing his resentment down hard.

"Let me tell you a little story about a pair of brothers from the Boeshane Peninsula..." John began.

*

They found Gray chained up amongst a pile of the bodies in the prison outpost, shivering from the cold, clinging onto a rusty knife.

Ianto watched as Captain John triumphantly helped him away from the pit of bodies of dead former prisoners. He gave over his tie to help clean the young man's face up a little and then even ended up handed over his jacket to help warm him up a bit. Then Ianto stood back and listened as Captain John started telling him all about his brother.

All the while, Gray remained nearly silent, his brow furrowed, his eyes cold as ice. Whenever he looked at Ianto, it caused chills. Something was wrong with him, he could just sense it, but he said nothing.

The first time that Jack's brother gave any indication that he was actually listening was when Captain John told him that 'Javic', now going by Jack, was safe and well, in fact better than well; that Jack was so safe and well he was actually completely immortal these days. Gray turned to him, sharply, and demanded his repeat what he had said.

The idiot Time Agent, still looking smug from his victory at finding the brother Jack had spent years searching for, confirmed it to him again, and Ianto tensed as he saw how Gray’s eyes grew even colder after that, if it was possible.

Captain John didn’t seem to notice. He really did like the sound of his own voice, Ianto thought.

It quickly became clear to Ianto, as they moved around the fortress for supplies, that Gray was a lot more comfortable with the technology within it than someone who had been a prisoner ought to be. He mentioned it quietly to Captain John, who just scoffed and said that of course he would have seen the Bane operating their equipment many times.

When he tried to press the point, the only response from Captain John was, "Oh quit whining."

Ianto hung back as much as he could, very much on edge. And, sure enough, when Gray made his move and suddenly activated a forcefield, separating Ianto from them both, he couldn't exactly say that he was surprised.

He tried to talk Gray down after he stunned Captain John with a blow to the head, and then strapped him into one of the Bane’s torture trays, gagging him with Ianto's tie as he did. When no response was given, he tried shouting, "He's not your enemy!" but Gray wasn't listening.

Apparently rescuing Jack’s little brother was not the brilliant plan it might have appeared to be on paper, Ianto thought, as he tried to find something on his side of the forcefield barrier to disrupt it.

On their way to the fortress, as they’d walked along the orange desert under the slowly darkening sky, John had shared his intention to rescue and then train Gray up as a Time Agent.

He wanted to do this as a way to draw Jack back into the fold, which Ianto took as vindication for his reaction earlier; Captain John _had_ wanted to steal Jack away from them. The only thing he'd got wrong had been the timing. He'd meant to persuade him to leave again, at least eventually.

It was interesting to hear a few tidbits about the mysterious Time Agency that he'd seen mentioned once or twice in old Torchwood paperwork relating to Jack. Captain John was nowhere near as shy about sharing information as Captain Jack was, and he owned that there weren’t too many of them left in the time he had come from. They needed new blood, and who better than Gray Thane, long lost brother of their most illustrious prodigal son, newly in need of a place to go and a new purpose as he recovered from his long years of capture. How happy Jack would be to find him there, alive and well. How _grateful_.

He’d made all the arrangements already in fact, Ianto learned. Due to a recent death in the ranks, Agent Eight would be Gray Thane's new designation, if he made it through training. Those few left at the Agency were already waiting for them at their training base, in the year 5090, on a fondly remembered planet with three orbiting moons and two suns, which provided the perfect set of forces for time coordination, according to Captain John.

Ianto's attempts to disrupt the barrier that Gray had erected with randomised presses of buttons on a nearby wall panel gradually halted as he listened to the traumatised young man detail his plans for revenge, as he welded the wristband to Captain John's flesh with some sort of blowtorch-like device. "What would be the best punishment?" he mused. "I want him to die, over and over and over. I want him to feel pain, like I have felt."

"But it wasn't his fault!" Ianto insisted, and Gray slowly turned around to him. "Jack... _Javic_ wouldn't ever want to hurt you. Of course he wouldn't! I'm sure he's sorry for what happened."

There was no spark in Gray's eyes to indicate that he had taken in what Ianto had said. They were just utterly dead, and Ianto shivered as he simply turned back around to continue his work. With the wristband bonded to flesh, he set to work attaching some sort of tiny additional device on the inside part. Once that was in place, he pulled a knife from the inside seam of his trousers and made a hole in Captain John's stomach with it. Then he slid a small flashing rectangle into his guts, before changing the settings on the blowtorch device to heal the wound up.

"Hey, what is that?" Ianto demanded.

"A bomb," Gray shared, unconcerned about telling him that.

"For god's sake. Just.. just talk to Jack!" Ianto pressed. "None of this is necessary!" He tried kicking the forcefield but it shocked him just enough to keep him back.

"I’m not interested in talking to him," Gray stated, a sharp edge at last peeking out from behind the unnatural calmness of voice. "My brother needs to pay. He needs to understand what it is to suffer. Truly suffer, as I have."

Captain John finally came around enough to push the improvised gag most of the way of his mouth. "What the hell does welding my damn wristband to me have to do with any of that?" he yelled. "And, also, OW! That really stings!"

"You will be my diversion," Gray told him. His cold dead stare was again turned to Ianto, as he continued, "I'm going to bury my brother alive, a long way in the past, where no one will ever find him."

"You can’t be serious," Ianto breathed.

Gray smiled for the first time. It was utterly terrifying.

The bottom fell out of Ianto's stomach at the thought of it... it was barbaric. With a note of desperation, he returned to the panel on the wall and, giving up on the buttons, wrenched its lid from its hinges and used it to smash it up.

To his relief, the forcefield fell just long enough for him to get through and to make a run at Gray. He pushed him aside from Captain John as hard as he could and made a grab for the period sword that the Time Agent kept attached to his belt.

As Gray turned, Ianto pressed the tip at Gray’s neck. "I don't want to hurt you but I can't let you do this," he warned.

If anything, the threat seemed to awaken some life in Gray's eyes again. "Why?" he asked. "What is my brother to you?"

"He's..." - _the man I love_ , his inside voice supplied, unhelpfully - "He's a good man. He doesn't deserve this. Just... stop this. Please."

Gray pressed his palm to the tip of the blade and pushed on it until Ianto saw blood. All the while, he continued smirking. It was obvious that there really would be no getting through to him.

Seeing the blood begin to roll down his wrist distracted Ianto just long enough for Gray to grab him, de-arming him in a swift movement. He held onto Ianto hard, the sword flipped around and pressed against his throat instead.

"I swear I’ll stop you," Ianto growled.

After a moment of thought, during which Ianto braced himself for getting his throat cut, Gray threw the sword aside and pushed Ianto down to the ground. "You swear you'll stop me?" he mocked, circling him. "How exactly?"

Ianto's eyes fell on Captain John's wristband, as he tried to gauge if he might be able to make a dash for it. It didn't matter where it was set to go next, so long as they got away.

A dirty bare foot connected hard against his cheek, knocking him sideways, momentarily dazing him. Gray stood over him, a looming shadow in his ugly brown rags, covered over by Ianto's own expensive suit jacket. Ianto wiped blood from a split lip with his ruined pink shirt sleeve.

"I'll warn him, Gray," he spat, in defiance. "No matter what, he’ll know you’re coming. I promise."

Gray thought about this for a moment. "Is that so?" he said with an ominous note of intrigue. Then he turned out the bottom hem of his shirt up and unrolled a slim grey object from it. He threw it at Ianto, challenging him to catch it. "Here's a key to the Bane transportation portal, taken from a guard. You might be able to find a way off this rock before it's irradiated. Maybe."

Ianto blinked at that, surprised. "Why would you-?"

"I wonder if you could actually do it. It could be quite... interesting."

"Hey Eye Candy, I wouldn't try that out," Captain John yelled. "The energy frequency used by the Bane will melt human skin right off. And that's only if you manage to calibrate a location that isn't in deep space."

That at least made sense to Ianto; Gray was such a sick bastard, goading him to do that.

He watched him unfasten the Captain's restraints and knew that he was going to be left behind. Ianto looked at the key in his hand, not sure whether to be glad that he had some sort of chance at least, or angry at the false hope it presented.

"If you get to Jack first," Ianto called over to Captain John as Gray hoisted him forward, voice quivering a little, "Tell him... tell him I'm sorry I missed our date. If not... well. This hasn’t been much fun and I won’t miss you."

Captain John's expression betrayed a begrudging respect at that, which was better than pity at least. Gray delivered a few deft taps to the welded-on wristband, and then both men disappeared in a flash of light upwards.

That was when the real fear settled over Ianto, with the silence that followed their departure. Here he was, stuck on a post-war alien moon, one which sounded like it wouldn't be around for much longer, and there was no one there to help him. He had no food or water, and he also had no idea if there were still any of these 'Bane' creatures left alive in the fortress, though he suspected that Gray had taken a lot of pleasure in murdering them all, prisoner and guard alike, meaning it was unlikely he'd find any survivors.

He tightened his fingers around the key that had been given to him. This was no time to get stuck in his own head. If there was a way to activate a portal out, that meant there was a chance for escape at least, even if it was small. So Ianto picked himself up and, after a moment of consideration, slid Captain Jack's sword into his belt, just in case. Then he set off deeper into the fortress, looking for anything that might look like it could activate a portal.

There were bodies everywhere and there was a bad smell lingering around many of them. Ianto catalogued them as he went, trying to figure out which were prisoners and which had been guards. In doing this, he noticed a few disturbing things; most of the prisoners had been killed using instruments of torture, and probably slowly judging by some of the expressions frozen on their haggard faces. This might have been the Bane's work alone, but he suspected not. Meanwhile, the bodies in thick silver suits, the guards, had not been killed by any weapons they might have been carrying, but had instead been sliced and diced, or their helmets caved in, along with the contents.

On the opposite side of the fortress, which was thankfully not large, he found a room with a console in it that matched the design of the key. He checked it over and found a slot. So Gray hadn't been lying about that, at least, he supposed.

Experimentally, he inserted it into the slot and gave it a turn. It projected a bunch of symbols above the console, which he found he could move around and poke, even though he had absolutely no idea what he was actually doing. He kept pressing buttons, sliding the shapes around, until there was a chime, and one particular icon took a central position and started to flash. He touched it with his finger, and sure enough, a bright oblong of orange and blue energy opened up just ahead, hovering over what looked like a slightly retrograde transporter pad.

"Okay, that's something," he muttered to himself. Now he had to figure out how to use the portal safely.

Ianto quickly backtracked a few corridors, back to one of the torture rooms, and he picked up a human-looking severed arm he'd noticed there before. He hurried back with it, and carefully inserted the hand end into the portal.

He held it just there for a count of three before pulling it back out, causing the portal to close behind it. Sure enough, the skin was bubbling and melting off the bone, crackling with energy. Ianto grimaced and threw it aside.

After a moment of further thought, he went back and looked more closely at the dead guards. They looked like they might be taller than a human, with larger heads, but they were definitely still humanoid in form overall, so that meant there was still one more possibility.

Again he retraced his steps, looking for another severed human-looking arm. It was a testimony to the cruelty of what had happened to so many people there that one wasn't difficult to find. Once located, he looked for a guard that had been dismembered enough for the metal uniform to be accessible, and eventually found a candidate in some poor fool who had been hung from hooks and hacked at.

Pointedly, he tried to pretend that he was just doing a Torchwood clean up. Nothing too unusual; Ianto was used to getting the shit jobs, including corpse disposal and morgue duty. If he didn't, he knew it would turn his stomach to be messing with body parts in this way. His will to survive was stronger than his disgust factor, though, and so he unapologetically pulled out the weird blue alien arm from its protective sheath, and then stuffed the bleeding humanoid arm inside instead.

Once again, he returned to the console, retraced his steps with the projected shapes and buttons, and re-ran his experiment with the portal. He held the arm in for a count of three, and then checked to see what damage might have been done.

As he'd hoped, the armour was protective. It seemed to be resistant enough to the energy generated to prevent any damage to the body beneath. Seeing the pink, human flesh untouched this time, he breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

He had a way out. Now he just needed to get up the courage to use it, knowing he had absolutely no way to know where the portal might take him.

*

It had been a very close run thing in the end, the heavy horn-like sound of enormous battle ships coming in overhead, and a loud bombing campaign starting in the distance rattling Ianto's nerves.

It had seemed like a perfect solution, until he actually tried to find a uniform that was both undamaged and enough of a fit to work. It quickly became a race against time, most of his earth clothes discarded, the sword too, fated to be left behind as he fought with the alien uniform to get it on as fast as he could, and then ran to the console to get it going again.

Everything started rattling, the fortress shaking from the foundations up, shockwaves coming in from all directions as the planet was cleared. Of course, that was when the console decided to be difficult. He tried everything, including kicking it, but it just kept throwing up odd symbols which looked like they might be error warnings.

It only finally started working at the very last moment, as the ceiling was starting to collapse in, and it left Ianto no time to pause and consider the danger of leaping headfirst into a portal which could send him literally anywhere in the universe, which was probably just as well.

There was a sensation of sinking, and moving so fast his ears actually popped, and then Ianto landed unsteadily on a flat pavement. For just the briefest of moments, he gave into wishful thinking and was absolutely certain that he was home, but on second glance the city around him was nothing like the bright lights of Cardiff, or even London. The buildings were not even close to anything that might be seen on earth, and nor were the big blue trees nearby.

Everything was in chaos and there were people running, hundreds of them, moving back and forth frantically around him. He saw families, children, everyone, all of them with various shades of yellow skin and strange reflective clothing.

It was incredibly windy and the purple tinged sky looked as though it was splitting into fragments, like glass breaking up. Ianto pulled his oversized helmet off to get a better look and was struck by how the tidal wave circle of energy was right above the point he had landed in in particular, as though he were standing in the exact eye of a storm.

He dropped the helmet as two men in white uniforms and helmets grabbed him by the arms and he was swept up with the crowds, carried along through the deafening noise, over ground that didn’t feel remotely stable.

The civilians were being bundled into shuttles waiting on the periphery of the paved stretch he'd arrived on, and Ianto could see that the men carrying him along were part of the same group of people helping the evacuation effort. As they came close to one of the shuttles, he pulled forward, expecting to have to get in alongside all of the various families, but the men holding him had other ideas.

They took him over to a woman in a white helmet, and some completely unintelligible conversation was had, leading to Ianto being escorted away to much a smaller shuttle, where he was pushed into the back and immediately handcuffed with a strange device that automatically moved as he moved to keep him in one place.

Ianto asked what was going on, but one of the white helmets pressed some baton to his neck and delivered a shock that stole his breath away.

He slumped against the window and watched as they lifted off behind the rest of the shuttles, battling through turbulence and flying around a series of major cyclones which were shooting out fiery lines into the sky. Ianto watched the ground they had been standing on minutes before split up like the sky and begin to oscillate, before small fragments started to be sucked back into a huge crackling energy rift of orange and blue down near the ground.

And suddenly, he realised. It was the exact same energy that the portal had shown. Ianto looked across to the faces of the two men in white helmets who had pushed him into the shuttle, and realised that they were glaring at him. No, not just glaring, having to hold themselves back, their anger incredibly apparent.

Ianto had a terrible, sinking feeling, that his arrival had just been the catalyst for some sort of catastrophe on this world.

And now he was completely at their mercy, lost in time and space, with no way home.


	2. The Prisoner

Ianto didn’t speak their language but he didn’t need to.

He knew a trial when he saw one.

It had been difficult to glean the truth of what had happened, the journey away from crumbling city something of a blur due to the turbulence and the electric shock he'd received. The surviving shuttles of the convoy had gone off in different directions, with his ship eventually landing alone within a large walled complex - presumably some sort of detention facility, given all the guards in white uniforms and hat standing ready.

Ianto had been taken inside and strapped into some sort of mind device that showed flashes of his recent memories on a screen for his captors to watch and record.

The footage they gleaned from him didn't look great, he had to admit; dead people everywhere, messing around with body parts, tampering with a console he had no idea how to operate and swiping past some obvious warning signs, and then throwing himself through without so much as a pause.

Next he'd been thrown into a prison cell with no windows and very bright lights, one side clear so that he could be seen at all times. It had a bed, at least, and something resembling a toilet, though there was no water in the bowl and the upper rim wasn't exactly shaped for comfort when seated. Then he'd been left there with nothing to do except wait.

Ianto had sat around, fiddling with his jumpsuit, replaying his landing in that city in his mind. He tried to rationalise everything as a coincidence, but worried incessantly still about whether he really had caused some sort of catastrophe. If he had, he had no idea how he was going to get out of the situation and do what he needed to do; find a way to get back to earth before Gray had a chance to carry out his sick plans.

When he couldn't stand thinking about it any longer, he lingered at the glass wall, watching the guards coming and going along the corridors beyond, still a bit stuck on the fact that these yellow people were all _aliens_. That he was on a completely different planet to earth... and, technically, _he_ was the alien here.

Ianto thought about how he had only stepped foot off-world once before in his life, when he'd gone through the Rift and rescued Jack from a hell planet. Not exactly a heroic act, since he'd been the one who'd caused Jack to get thrown there in the first place, and it had only taken about ten minutes to get in and out again, but it had been kind of profound all the same. So far as he knew, aside from Jack, none of the other Torchwood team members had been off-world. It was their little secret.

And now here he was, trapped on Planet Simpsons. This was really more of a Jack situation, he thought as he paced, not able to get past how utterly surreal it all was for him to be living this.

Nothing the guards had said at any point made any sense to him, try as he did to figure some of the strange clucking, barking noises out.

At some point during his incarceration, an older man came to visit with a slightly different manner to him, and Ianto guessed he might be some sort of legal representative, if that was even a thing. That man at least had taken some time to try and explain a few things, using pictures, from which Ianto gleaned that there was some law or treaty broken by using a portal, and that the Bane uniform he had been wearing was part of the reason he was being held, though he couldn't quite make out whether that was because they thought he was one of them, or just some sort of agent of theirs.

The thing that had stuck with him, that replayed in his mind over and over, was the news report styled video which the man showed him of buildings collapsing, and people running as the ground swallowed them. He couldn't tell exactly how many lives had been lost, but clearly it had been a significant number. It was horrible.

As he'd been transferred out of the facility, Ianto had noticed that there were large angry mobs gathered outside, and significant protests happening. He had hoped they weren't happening because of him, but it wasn't exactly subtle.

And so they'd taken him to a trial, strapped up on a trolley-like board like he was Hannibal Lector, where he'd had to watch the evidence presented to the gathered, including recordings of his arrival which clearly showed that the portal had caused an enormous tear in the fabric of their world. The din around him, all of the barking and growling and screeches of pain, left him feeling very small in the midst of so much hostility.

Ianto tried to find a way to communicate to them it was an accident. He absolutely had not meant to hurt anyone, he'd just been escaping a shitty situation the only way he could. The older man who he supposed must be representing his case did seem to be arguing for more time spent allowing him to speak but it was to no avail. As advanced as they were as a species, linguistics technology just didn't appear to be part of the package deal.

Even if it had been, Ianto got the strong impression that it wouldn't have mattered anyway. This was not just a trial, but a show trial.

He tried to stay calm, to do what he imagined Jack might do. That didn't entirely help though, as he felt sure that Jack would have already managed to charm his way out of the situation. In fact, he probably had been in this exact situation, at least a dozen times. That was the sort of guy Jack was.

It wasn't the sort of guy Ianto was though. He tried to stay stoic and wait it out, but as the trial came to an end and a sentence was passed, a tremendous sense of nervousness overcame him.

All of the screens in the area started flashing a squashed sideways number 8 symbol, almost like the sign for an infinity loop on earth, and then he could hear great cheers of approval coming from outside as they did. There was a general atmosphere of approval in the room as well, but he could see that the man representing him was not pleased.

He had no idea what the sentence was, but it couldn't be anything good.

As he was taken away, it was as if he was a persona non grata. None of them would look at him, or give any indication he was being heard as he tried to ask for answers.

He was taken away in another shuttle, narrowly avoiding a mob as he was taken, and transported upwards to an orbiting station.

Once there, he was stripped completely and taken to a machine which looked like a large CAT scanner. The last thing he thought before he was pushed into it was that he wanted to take a piss. But there was no time for that. The machine came to life and he felt like it was radiating him, right through to the bone. It made him feel dizzy and nauseous, his skin tighter than it should be.

That ordeal over, Ianto was given white overalls to wear, which he put on gratefully, if a little shakily. Then he was led onwards through a dark corridor and towards a door at the end which had the same infinity-esque symbol etched onto it.

Incarceration, he guessed, which was actually a slight relief. Though the aliens were obviously advanced, he had still worried that his punishment was going to be physical; lashed in the streets, maybe a limb chopped off, maybe even capital punishment. It was possible that the room ahead might kill him, but that fear dissipated as soon as he was flung inside.

It was a perfectly square room, around eight or nine square metres around, with all of the white walls appearing like they were illuminated from behind. It was completely empty, except for a slender plinth in the centre with a button on top of it.

There was no bed and no toilet either, which confused him. Ianto tried to turn back, to ask them how long he'd be there, but the door was closed before he could, and he watched as it melted into the wall and disappeared.

Ianto spent the first few hours in there in a state of terror over the possibility of his air supply running out, since there were no windows and no obvious sources of oxygen. Perhaps that was the capital punishment, he thought.

Finally, he realised, with a sudden jolt, that he actually didn’t seem to need to breathe. While he was doing it out of habit, he discovered that he could actually hold his breath indefinitely if he wanted to.

That was the first clue he had that something very strange had happened to him.

After a while, Ianto realised that he also wasn’t hungry or thirsty either and, although he still felt as though he needed to pee, it wasn’t desperate and it wasn’t changing. Experimentally, Ianto stood in the corner and tried to let it out all the same, only to find that he couldn't.

He waited for a while, listening to the silence, circling the tiny space as he tried to figure out what to do. Ianto tried shouting, screaming even, to see if it would provoke a reaction anywhere, but there was nothing.

A dark suspicion came over him concerning the plinth with the button. Maybe, Ianto thought, the room was created to induce some sort of self-euthanasia. Capital punishment with no blood left on anyone's hands.

It didn’t take a genius to conclude that they had somehow frozen his body and left his mind carrying on as normal. This was a space of completely solitude and timelessness, he concluded, meaning that someone would have only two options; go mad, or die.

At the end of maybe his first week, with no stubble on his chin, and no markers for hunger or even sleep, the sensory depravation really truly began to break him down. Ianto grudgingly admired the ingenuity of it. There could be nothing worse than this, truly.

The button became more and more attractive, and he stared at it as he moved around, finding new positions to lie in on the floor, forcing himself to doze, though it was more of a waking sleep than anything.

Ianto thought about Jack, and about Gray, a lot. He would have done anything to try and stop Jack's brother from harming him, just as he'd promised. He hated that he'd been prevented from seeing his mission to stop him through, thanks to this accident.

Even when he'd given that message to Captain John, about missing their date, Ianto had still hoped in his heart of hearts that he'd still get back in time somehow.

But it was over. He had to accept it. Ianto stood in front of the plinth for some time, staring at the button, knowing that he was going to have to do it. He couldn't stand being trapped there, frozen, any longer. No one could survive this.

"I'm sorry Jack," he said, feeling like he needed to get a few things out before his probable death, and though he felt like he could cry, no tears would actually leave his eyes. "I wish... I wish you hadn't left. Not that I blame you for it really. I mean, I know you needed to find the Doctor and that was your big chance. Part of me wishes I'd been enough for you, but that's just not who you are. Still, I wish we'd got that second chance. It might have worked out, you know. I wish I could have gone back, shown up the way I wanted to... been your hero for a change. That would have been kind of something. I guess I really messed this up." Ianto swayed on his feet for a few moments, his chin upturned, his eyes closed. "Mum, Rhiannon... I love you both and I'm sorry it ended like this."

As he placed his hand on the button, he found himself remembering that stupid moment searching for clues on Rift activity, where Jack had asked him out for the first time.

It would have been nice, he reflected, but Ianto had never had much luck with nice things. The story of his life.

Finally, Ianto pressed the button, and something zapped into his forehead.

_"Can we maybe drop the 'Sir' now? I mean, while I was away I- I was thinking, maybe we could, you know, when this is all done... dinner, a movie?" Jack asked, half hiding himself behind a support column in the office building they were searching, looking strangely vulnerable for some reason.  
_

_He never looked, or sounded, like that. Jack was always a picture of flirtatiousness, and it stopped Ianto in his tracks. He turned to Jack, hands on his hips. "Are... you asking me out on a date?"_

_Jack threw his chin up, almost defiantly, as if squaring up for a fight about it because he wasn't going to take no for an answer. "Interested?" he asked._

Then Ianto was back in the cell. It was as if he had relived the memory, like he had actually been there, and then after no more than a few second he felt it burn away, leaving a gap. Ianto knew that he had been thinking of _something_ when he pressed the button, and he had a lingering sensation of emotions from it still, a warm glow, but the specific memory itself was gone.

He was alive still, sure, but now he knew that the button was possibly something far worse than death. Experimentally, Ianto tried to think of a memory that was completely useless to him, and he settled on a childhood memory, of a time he found a dead caterpillar. With that in his mind, he pressed the button again, relived it as though he was there, and then he had no idea what it was that he had just experienced again, except for the echo trace of a sad feeling that soon went away as well.

So that was the real punishment then, he realised. It was set up to drive him mad, allowing him a self destructive way to trade his memories for an experience to relieve the tedium. Ianto sat in the corner for a while after he realised that, paralysed with the horror of his situation. He resolved not to give in... not to press the button again. That was how they won, he decided. He could win, just by not pressing it.

At least, that was what he thought at the time. Ianto wasn’t to know then that he was going to spend the better part of two hundred years there, in that cell, all alone.

He wasn't to know that there was no winning in this situation.

Life was a void. A blur. He had nothing, except ten metres square to pace or stare at or scream into until he hurt his ears. He tried to make a task of coming up with patterns of movement around the cube space, giving each one a number and devising sequences to then challenging himself to remember them - _sequence 1; 100 times counterclockwise around - sequence 2; 90 times clockwise, 5 times counterclockwise, 5 hand claps - sequence 3..._ \- but there was a limit to how much of that he could stand, especially since giving the memory away afterwards and starting again was such an empty experience, without any feelings evoked.

His only real source of actual sanity-preserving entertainment or respite came with the plinth; the hated plinth that was as much his salvation as it was his punishment.

Boredom invaded his senses like worms burrowing under his skin and, as much as he hated the notion of trading his memory for a short term fix, there was no other option. He tried to break bones, knock himself out by banging his head on the walls, even trying to claw at his neck, but whatever had been done made it completely impossible. And so needed something, anything, and so using the plinth became something he would spend all his time resisting and then rationing as a treat.

At first he gave up small memories; learning to tie his shoelaces; figuring out a perfect recipe for a tasty dish of his creation; grazing his knee as a child; forgetting to pay his fare on a bus once. Small things.

Ianto tried to create a hierarchy; memories he didn't want lose first, followed by memories he desperately wanted to experience, one last time. It was hard though, as if he was being torn apart in tiny scraps, over and over.

Inevitably, he started to run out of the small memories. That made his memories of bigger events haunt him all the more; his father's death, his mother's cancer scare, meeting Lisa, losing Lisa, his sister's wedding, when he became an Uncle, joining Torchwood One, joining Torchwood Three, Jack, Jack, Jack, and eventually he even lost the memories related to how he’d come to be in that cell.

All too soon, he couldn't even remember his name anymore, as every memory of someone saying it to him was gone.

When he hit that point, the Prisoner knew that he was in danger of losing his mind entirely for the sake of pretending for a few moments that he wasn’t trapped. But as the years rolled by, unmarked except as part of the endless void he was stuck inside, it seemed less and less important. He traded more and more.

Yet here was still one memory the Prisoner kept in a strong box, separate, because it was simply too important to lose; and that was his memory of Gray, promising to bury Jack alive, and himself swearing that he would find a way to get home and stop him. Even as he chewed into the memories around that, it was the one thing he refused to let go of, as it represented the last slither of hope that he might, one day, somehow get free. If he did, that was the one thing he _had_ to do.

It reduced down to three commands in his mind: _Get home. Stop Gray. Save Jack._

It didn't matter than he couldn't remember where home was. Or who Gray was. Or why Jack had to be saved. It just mattered that he did it.

Then, one day, 190 years after he'd been thrown into the cube, a green figure appeared, blurry and abstract through the glass-like wall. It pressed against it as if looking inside, and the Prisoner scrambled back from it with surprise.

The Prisoner knew very few things about himself or his life now. He was vaguely certain that he wasn’t supposed to be there, but the details of it all were long gone.

The green figure disappeared then, and the Prisoner was extremely grateful that it had even appeared at all, because this was a brand new memory. It was a memory he could give to the plinth, which was a rare gift.

But then the green figure returned, and the Prisoner put his hands over his ears as he heard the distant sound of voices that weren't his own, so unused to hearing anything that wasn't his own voice now.

Finally, the cube melted away around the Prisoner, leaving him inside a cavernous dark room. Standing in front of him was a man in a long green coat, his hair flowing with beautiful auburn curls, his eyes vivid and blue. He looked at the Prisoner with no small amount of curiosity.

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a device of some kind, like a long stick with a light on the end. The Prisoner shuffled back as he went closer to him, afraid of what he was going to do.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you," the man said, and his voice sounded kind.

The Prisoner tentatively stopped, and allowed the man close enough to flash his little light over him. As he crouched down before him, the Prisoner reached out and touched the corner of his coat, and he gasped at the soft sensation of it between his fingers.

"So you're the mystery man," the man deduced, seeming curious.

The Prisoner reached out to him, still not quite daring to believe he was real. The sensation of touching another person, skin to skin, for first time in so long, completely overwhelmed him and he threw himself at the stranger, clinging on desperately.

"Please..." he muttered, his voice rough and gravelly. "I need to go home."

The man gently held him at arms length, and asked, "Where is home?"

The Prisoner's face crumpled. "I don't remember."

"Hmm, well perhaps we can figure that out later. Do you remember your name?"

Sadly, he shook his head.

The man helped him to stand and then smiled at him, like some kind of vision. He pocketed his stick device and then stepped back, straightening his cravat and smoothing down his long green jacket. "Well, we'll figure that out later then. Pleased to meet you," he said. "I'm the Doctor."

Then he took him by the hand and guided him towards the exit.


	3. The Companion

Almost as soon as they made it to the door out, the ground was shaking. With a screeching, metallic clang, the roof of the dark room they were in was ripped right off and upwards towards the darkness of space beyond, though it got stuck on an energy forcefield before it made it too far away.

The Doctor immediately pulled the Prisoner into a run. "You’re the last one incarcerated here," he yelled as they hurried along. "The others were evacuated but the Ferosians left you behind. They’re gone now. We have to hurry, this station is tearing itself apart!"

The Prisoner's skin suddenly cried at out and recoiled with the crack of something like electricity across his skin. Amidst the sensation, almost like being hit by lightning, his lungs ached with a sudden need for oxygen. His mind went into a tailspin of colour and shapes, his small world shattering around him and no clues as to what was happening now.

"Bit of an accident, really," the Doctor was shouting as he pulled him back to his feet to continue running, "But if their government will keep channelling random Rifts and energy signatures towards their planet to try and create superweapons then they really only have themselves to blame!"

With the Doctor still leading him along by the wrist, finally burst out through a final large door, taking them onto the a metal platform together. From there, the dome-like forcefield around the place could be seen due to all of the fritzing, caused by various pieces of buildings and other objects either stuck against it or halfway lodged and sliding slowly through on their way to being shot out into the universe beyond.

The Prisoner fell down and cried out again the moment he crossed the threshold, shivering as a wave of blue energy crackled over him and the visibly dissipated into the air.

"You're coming out of stasis. It doesn't work outside the complex," the Doctor said, holding onto him as he writhed.

When at last it passed, the Prisoner was helped urgently onto his feet and, together, they ran forward, narrowly ducking all of the flying bits of metal coming at them. With every step, it became harder to move forwards, the sucking motion of the air escaping through the forcefield barrier trying to drag them back. And although the Prisoner had no idea where they were going, he knew that he didn't want to get thrown upwards into space, so whatever the Doctor was running towards had to be the better option.

On the other side of a shuttle landing strip stood a strange blue box, completely out of place against everything else. It was shaking around quite a lot, as if it was in imminent danger of being sucked upwards as well.

They made it in the end though, and the Doctor let go of the Prisoner in order to pull at a chain around his neck, a key revealed at the end of it.

"Not really used to having guests over these days, I have to admit!" the Doctor shouted over the din, "But nevermind. Welcome aboard!"

The Prisoner opened his mouth to reply, but had no idea what to say. The door opened though with the turn of the key and he fled inside without much of a second thought. The Doctor leapt in after him and pulled the door closed against the sucking force of the escaping air outside. Then, while the Prisoner marvelled at the cavernous size of the room he was standing in, the Doctor ran forward to some sort of central control console and frantically started pressing buttons and pulling levers.

The box shook from side to side violently as it achieved some kind of lift-off, and the Prisoner clung onto a panel at the side near the door, the din and motion of it all overwhelming him completely.

After a few minutes, the shaking died away and everything became strangely peaceful. Once it was finally settled, the Doctor gave out a triumphant 'whoop!' sound, and then jogged over back to the Prisoner, grinning and laughing. But then he looked down at his legs and his expression changed at once to dismay.

The Prisoner followed his gaze and realised that his leg was wet, his white overalls yellowing. Something had happened and he didn’t know what it was.

Fear struck him hard and he found himself gasping for breath and shaking. His legs started to give way at thought and he sank downwards, eyes wide and heart thumping. "I'm dying..." he gasped.

The Doctor ran over to him and cradled him as he sank down, preventing a hard fall. "No you're not. It's alright. You’ve just forgotten. It’s a natural function but you didn’t know to control it." Sympathy once again radiated from the strange man in the soft green coat. "I have similar problems sometimes, with my memory I mean. I... forget. Sometimes. I know you’re scared. You were in the stasis cube far longer than any of the others. Far far longer."

The Prisoner swallowed hard, thinking how strange it was to be so close to another person like him, so solid and real and not at all imagined. He was teetering on the edge of shutting down, but the eyes were very expressive and reassuring and he fought against the urge. "Do I..." he cleared his throat, finding the sensation of speaking odd after so long, " _Did_ I know you?"

The man thought about it for a moment and grinned. "No, but you do now. Some philosophers of time and inevitabilities would say the answer is yes, since meeting once out of time is to meet always out of time... but that's not important right now."

The Prisoner clung onto him tightly, looking straight into his bright blue eyes. "Thank you," he breathed. "I- I can never repay you."

That truly seemed to touch his rescuer, if his smile was anything to go by. "No need for any of that. From what I know of your arrival on that planet, you’ve been the most terrible victim of circumstances. But don't worry, I have a most wonderful plan!" He helped the Prisoner to his feet and ran back to the central console, once again pressing buttons and pulling levers with glee. "The hot-pool waterfalls of Sandree. That’ll be just the trick to get you cleaned up and feeling human again. Trust me. Then we can get to work on the rest later."

The Prisoner had questions coming to him second by second but he didn’t want to ask them yet. For some reason, he trusted the man to tell him later if he should ask. For now, he was willing to stand back and let the Doctor lead him wherever he wanted to go.

_Get home. Stop Gray. Save Jack._ That memory was preserved, and the Prisoner was able to calm himself by focusing onto it. Whatever else happened, he had a purpose and a direction at least.

Though nervous of leaving the refuge he had been offered, he followed the Doctor out of the blue box onto a beautiful alien world filled with tall trees, and they walked together over to a small waterfall leading into a river. A group of very short attendants in blue uniforms came over to greet them, apparently happy to receive them and very eager to see to their needs. The Prisoner's overalls were peeled away by them and he was helped across into the hot pool at the bottom of the waterfall, and though the anxiety rose as he approached it, not knowing what to expect from it, he couldn't believe how good it felt once he was in the water.

The Doctor hung back for a little while, chatting to one of the attendants, but then he too removed all of his clothes and sunk down into the pool as well. They were given something in tall glasses, and the Prisoner had to watch the Doctor to figure out what he was supposed to do; he had to put the straw in his mouth and suck down the blue liquid in the glass. When he tried it, he coughed at first, but then some old muscle memory kicked in and he was glad he's tried it; it tasted incredibly good, even if the act of pulling it into his body felt completely alien.

As the Prisoner's mind began to drift into emptiness, a strange languid sensation began rushing into his head that made his eyes flutter closed, and the Doctor dragged him out of the pool before he slipped under the water. The attendants gathered around them immediately with big squares of fabric that they used to help them both dry off. Their clothes were returned to them and the white overalls the Prisoner had arrived in now smelled all fresh and clean.

While the Doctor was happy to put his own back on, the Prisoner didn't really want to dress in them again. In fact, his whole being rebelled against the idea.

Fortunately the Doctor didn't seem to mind. The attendants donated one of their fabric squares, which he held around his waist as they walked back to the blue box, which he had heard the Doctor refer to as his TARDIS while they were in the water. Once they were safely back inside, the Doctor threw him into an enormous wardrobe filled with clothes from every time and place in the universe, and instructed him to find something he liked.

It wasn't easy figuring that out. If anything, there was too much choice. The only clear memory he had to call upon was the memory of the man called Gray, wearing a pinstripe jacket over some brown rags. The Prisoner found a jacket that wasn't too dissimilar to that, if a little large on him. It came with some matching trousers, which he also pulled out. Some smaller clothes, underwear and socks, popped out of a drawer with it, as if the TARDIS itself was making a suggestion, and the Prisoner pulled out a plain white shirt to go under the jacket as well. Finally, he tried out a few pairs of items for his feet, which he'd seen the Doctor wearing, opting in the end for some plan black shoes that felt sturdy. He had a strong feeling that he wanted shoes that he could wear for a long time, that he could run in, or walk for miles if he needed to.

Looking in the mirror, there was a very distant echo of recognition there, but with it came a note of sadness that he didn't like. So after a moment of uncomfortable thought, the Prisoner ditched everything. Instead he picked out some plain overalls that were almost the same as the ones he had got rid of, though they were more of a grey colour and the fabric was different. He'd wanted something different, but this was all he could really fathom to wear at this point.

The Doctor returned and didn't seem entirely enthused by his choice, but he accepted it without comment at least.

When the Prisoner felt that strange fluttery darkening feeling again in his brain, the Doctor led him to a room with a platform it in that he called a bed, which did ring a distant bell. He told the Prisoner to lie down and get some sleep, which he remembered as a concept, but hadn't been able to manage beyond zoning out inside the cube.

His host left him alone then, and he lay on top of it for a while, staring into nothing. The bed was very soft and he felt strange lying there, with such a big space around him. It was like being stuck falling, like any second he could land with a hard thud. So instead the Prisoner crawled under the bed and lay down there, far more settled on the sturdy floor, within a more confined space where he could see the boundaries of it very clearly.

There were no dreams in his empty mind, but it was the first time he'd actually switched off for so long, it was a slightly frightening sensation. He woke with a bit of a shriek as a result and flailed his way back out from under the bed.

Thankfully the Doctor was there, sitting aside in a chair, quietly reading a book. The Prisoner took a moment to calm himself down and then stretched his arms out, not used to his limbs feeling the after-effects of rest. He waited for the Doctor to say something, but he seemed like he was just there to be a calming presence, rather than to talk.

The Prisoner considered asking questions about his rescue; why had the Doctor been there? What did he mean that he had been a victim of some injustice? What was a TARDIS? _Who_ exactly was this stranger? But in the end he found he didn't want to know, like the act of asking might cause some sort of calamity that would undo it all, and land him right back inside the cube.

After a few minutes of silence, the Doctor closed his book and left.

The Prisoner followed him, silently watching his relocation into the main central chamber. He watched as the Doctor flipped switches on a device on a table by the wall to heat up water and strained it through some bags of tiny herbs or leaves and into cups. One was offered to him and he readily accepted it.

"Not too fast, it's hot," the Doctor cautioned. "Tea. A wonderful invention by your species. Revolutions have been made out of it. Very refreshing." He led the Prisoner over to a seating area of floral-pattern seats at the side of the chamber, encouraging him to sit down with the cup in hand. "Now then, all I have been able to learn of you from the Ferosian records is that you have none of the typical biological enhancements that would indicate you are from humanity's star age, which tells me that you are not only very far from home, but also rather displaced from your own time period. I am a frequent visitor to your home planet, as you may have gathered."

"My home planet," he muttered. "Yes... I need to get home."

"Home to Earth, yes. Wonderful place actually. I've visited all sorts of time periods and it never ceases to fascinate. Your age was approximated to between twenty and twenty-five, based on their carbon dating scans. Add 190 years in the cube, and you're around 210 to 215 years old now, which is rather unusual for a human. We shall have to look out for side effects. I will be keeping a close eye on you, if that is alright with you?"

The Prisoner nodded, gratefully. "I trust you, Doctor," he said.

"Wonderful." The Doctor sipped at his tea, and smiled as the Prisoner copied him. "Now, let's talk memories. A very cruel thing not to have them. I know that better than most." The way the Doctor's voice tailed off, and his eyes went faraway, told the Prisoner that this was the main reason he was helping him; he really was sympathetic to what had happened to him. "I had a slightly difficult regeneration and it took some time to remember quite a lot of things, but I got there, just as I'm sure you will."

"There is... I feel like I had something important to do before all of this."

The Doctor cocked his head a little as he considered this. "Some memory you've tried to preserve?"

"I need to stop someone called Gray... he is going to do something, something terrible. I need to save someone called Jack, but..." the Prisoner frowned, "I don't know who that is."

"Hmm, well. There are bound to be some things rattling around in that brain of yours which will help us to figure out where and when you were when you fell through that transportation portal. Hopefully, in time, we'll figure out your name at the very least."

"Hopefully," he parroted him.

"For now, I'm going to need to call you something. Human seems a bit impersonal. I could find a database perhaps, let you pick something out for now?"

The idea of that made him a bit uncomfortable. He really had no idea of what to say, so the Prisoner just shrugged.

"Alright, let's leave that to one side for now." The Doctor brightened then, his enthusiasm infectious enough to pull the Prisoner out of the mire of sadness that was threatening him. "Now, do drink up. We have work to do. You see, I have a plan..."

*

The Prisoner soon settled into a daily rhythm on the TARDIS, waking and resting in a pattern he supposed had once been normal to him. He learned what to do when he was hungry, or thirsty, or needed to relieve himself, and gradually it all started to feel natural again.

He kept himself busy by caring for the TARDIS' interior, dusting the many columns, statues and rugs in the central chamber, cleaning the bookshelves, watering the plants, and lighting the various candles that the Doctor had placed here and there for ambience. The Doctor shared that it was an eclectic mix of Victoriana and Art Nouveau, two time periods on earth that he greatly admired. His clothing too was Earth inspired, of a gothic romantic period, he told the Prisoner, who listened and catalogued it all, even though he had no basis of reference beyond what the Doctor taught him.

In an effort to be useful, he asked the Doctor to teach him how to help check over and tune the console as well, which the Doctor was uncertain of at first, but agreed to when the TARDIS herself took to purring under the Prisoner's careful ministrations. It worked out well for them both, as it took a lot of the maintenance burden off the Doctor's shoulders. The Prisoner had observed that he was never happier than he was when he was sitting at his desk, or on one of his chairs, reading books or listening to music, and that made him more determined to make sure he had the time for it.

Over time, the Doctor started to throw out names for him, where before it had always been an impersonal Guest or Visitor. He became Assistant, Attendant, Helper, Companion... and the Prisoner decided that he liked the word Companion the most, because it seemed so much more personal than all the others. So he asked the Doctor to just call him that, as it was what he most wanted to be in gratitude for all that the Doctor had done for him.

Although he suspected it wouldn't have been the word chosen if he'd left it up to the Time lord entirely, the Doctor was gracious enough to go with his wishes.

Unfortunately, the Companion couldn't read any of the books on the shelves aside from the numbers in them, though he did occasionally take a look to be sure. For some reason, it made him sadder than anything else that he must have known at least one of the languages they were written in, and yet couldn't now; too many memories of childhood lessons traded, he supposed. And though he enjoyed an easy camaraderie with the Doctor overall and shared most of his thoughts, that was something he kept to himself.

The Doctor's plan was to chase down some old friends he thought might be able to help his Companion. Simple enough, it seemed, except that they were wanderers, like goatherds travelling across intergalactic spans, tending to their animals. One such animal apparently had the ability to pull lost memories to the surface and that was what the Doctor wanted his Companion to try.

It took some time, following leads and going from planet to planet, trying to track them down. It left some time for the Companion to work on it himself as well. Every tiny snatch of a memory was too incomplete to mean anything to him though. It wasn't until a misunderstanding occurred with purchasing some food, leading to a chase through a trader outpost marketplace, that something tangible was at last kindled in the Prisoner's mind.

The Doctor tumbled into a cart during their escape and tore a hole in his green velvet coat. As soon as they were back in the TARDIS, laughing at the absurdity of it all, the Prisoner had taken the coat from his shoulders and started thinking about how to repair it. Then, suddenly, he remembered doing this before with another coat... a dark grey-blue one. He felt a squeeze to his heart as he remembered it, knowing somehow that it had been precious to him. Or rather, who it belonged to had been, perhaps. He found himself pressing his nose to the collar, tearing up over it, even though this coat wasn't even close to the same and he knew that the Doctor must have found his reaction peculiar. Thankfully, no comment was made as he showed the Companion how to sew, and also how to brush the velvet down and care for it, with the impression given that the Companion was welcome to do this if he wanted to in the future.

The Doctor really was a good person. He sometimes claimed that he wasn't, that he'd had to do some terrible things, but the Companion didn't buy it. There was a core of something in him, like an inner light, that the Companion increasingly gravitated towards. So much so, that he started to wonder if he actually wanted to remember, since remembering would end this crazy adventure. He began to question whether he really wanted to go home if it meant parting with the Doctor.

He hoped, rather than knew, that the Doctor was beginning to enjoy having him around as well. He certainly seemed to appreciate everything the Companion did, all of the little tasks that made the TARDIS feel homely, much as he said that it wasn't all strictly necessary.

The Companion focused as much as he could on making new memories in that time, since he couldn't quite get past the possibility that they might be taken away from him again, somehow, one day. Big or small, all memories were carefully kept, as the Companion knew better than most how precious they were.

The memory which he knew he would treasure most came as an energy pulse threw the TARDIS off its coordinates, leading to an adventure on a waystation filled with humans from the forty-fourth century, where the Doctor was rewarded for shutting down the energy pulses (inside job, great fun in the reveal) with a box of antique human artefacts, which he accepted on the pretence that it might help jog the Companion's memory. They had a wonderful evening with the TARDIS lingering in a beautiful rainbow nebula, as they worked through every single one of the vinyl records that had been provided. None of the music played or the images on the cover sleeves rang any bells with the Companion, of course, but seeing the Doctor singing along and even getting up and dancing about to a few he liked, meant that it it really didn't matter.

There was one vinyl in particular that made the Doctor extra happy, as it was by someone called Glen Miller, who he claimed to have met once on a ragtag junk ship near the end of the universe. He eagerly taught the Companion some steps to a form of dance called a Jitterbug, and it quickly became clear that the Doctor was actually a pretty terrible dancer, but it was more fun that way besides. Then the track changed to something he called a Moonlight Serenade, and suddenly, the pace was achingly slow, but they kept on all the same, like they were both just stealing moments.

The Companion did everything he could to memorise every moment of it, knowing that this would be the memory he treasured most after it was all over, and their inevitable parting came.

In time, they located the nomads, flying in a bizarre contraption of a ship that looked like a giant bottle-shaped patchwork of metal pieces, all welded together haphazardly, with a field of nets and pens for creatures that were space based rolling on behind it. The Doctor was welcomed by the wanderers, with the caveat of being given a long tour of every pen in the ship's interior, since they were so proud of their menagerie of strange alien creatures.

The one that the Doctor was looking for was only very small, no larger than a toad or a lizard, and also very rare. They called it a 'borfalger wetch', and it looked like a tiny shaggy dog for the most part, but with a four-legged starfish in place of a head. The Companion was asked to lay down on a bale of hay-like stuff, and he was warned that it would take some time. There would be a first flush of initial memories, but then the wetch would need to stay with him for a long time. He had to be certain that he wanted to do this, they told him.

The Companion thought about it longer than he should have. He knew that the Doctor could practically read his thoughts, that he didn't want it to lead to him leaving, but at the same time the Companion knew that the Doctor thought it the right thing to do. After all, the Companion had a mission that he had forgotten and the Time Lord was not the sort to stand in the way of something that had been important to him once, even if he couldn't remember why.

So he agreed, and laid down as the creature was held over his head, until the starfish part latched onto his temple like a leech. It detached from the rest, he discovered, and he screamed out with surprise when it suddenly embedded itself with razor-like edges into his skin. It felt like it was releasing something into him, like poison, and it overwhelmed him. He was vaguely aware of hours passing in a fever, with the Doctor dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth and occasionally holding his hand. Finally, the wetch stopped whatever it was doing, stopped pulsing, and then relaxed.

Just like that, a flood of new memories flashed into his brain, but it was all a jumble. He remembered some pieces of his childhood, that he had a sister, and a father - he had hated him - and he recalled something vague about metal stomping robot-men that struck fear right through him. He remembered there was someone he wanted to see; someone with a big smile, eyes nearly as blue as the Doctor’s. But as to who that man was, there was nothing else to go on.

With the initial attachment successful, the Companion was able to go. The wetch itself remained on his temple, a new constant companion of his own, and it felt a little strange, but he was assured that over time it would keep helping him to regain what was lost. When it had done all it could, it would detach on its own. All that was needed was patience.

It was the best news the Companion could have got. He was very happy to have more of an excuse to stay with the Doctor, at least a little while longer while his memories began to reform.

The first thing he did when he was back in the TARDIS was get rid of the overalls. The Companion returned to the wardrobe and found a button up shirt and a pair of bracers, and a nicely tailored brown English suit from the 1920s Earth era that absolutely fitted him to a tee, bemused to discover that he actually now welcomed that sense of recognition, where before it had only felt out of place. The Doctor seemed a little taken aback as he showed it off to him, but the Companion didn't dwell. He was quick to brew some tea, hoping to make it obvious that nothing had changed; that he was still the same helpful Companion that he always had been.

Although the Companion had some idea of the Earth era he belonged to now, he kept that to himself, and instead redoubled his efforts to be useful to the Doctor, making sure that his coat was constantly being repaired, that his slippers were always on hand when he wanted them, that the records and books were always tidy, even if he still couldn't seem to read them to catalogue them properly; small things that he hoped were really appreciated.

Small things that made him feel peaceful and at home there.

The Doctor was like an overgrown child, running from place to place and having adventure after adventure, yet he also had a lingering sadness which the Companion wished he couldn’t sense; loneliness beyond measure, that simply made it impossible for the Companion to leave. The time started to stretch, though neither man mentioned it, as they hopped across planets, watched cosmic events occurring across the universe and met all sorts of people. There were adventures, but also a lot of quiet times, and while the Companion did everything he could to help the Doctor when he was in one of his darker moods, there were just some things that couldn’t be helped.

With the wetch in place, the Companion's dreams started to return, as if he brain itself were a filing system in disarray and things were bit by bit being put in order. One morning he woke up with the wetch pulsing strangely, and he had memories of Gray again... something important, about a planet with three orbiting normal moons and two suns. _The perfect set of forces for time coordination... the year 5090..._

It tugged at him, feeling it was part of this important mission, and he went to the Doctor to tell him about it, but before the Doctor could tell him if he knew where that might be, everything changed without warning.

The TARDIS suddenly went into a tailspin, and before he knew it, they were plunged into the middle of a huge spiralling war across time. The Companion saw a thousand planets burn and collapse in exactly the same way as the planet he’d fallen onto so long ago, Ferosia, had expired. Causality was catching up with them, according to the Doctor, because the Time Lords were manipulating time rifts to try and defeat an invasion by a race called the Daleks. Because the Daleks also had access to the same technology, they were also changing things to thwart the attempts. It had spilled out from their nature constellation and now everything was in danger of total collapse.

It was like one big game of chess, the Doctor told him, with a billion planets being sacrificed as pawns and no one able to reach checkmate. With every move, time was being altered in an attempt at defeating the other side and chaos was encroaching.

The Doctor told him that the only way to stop them was to take away the source of all of their power; to channel the vortex energy powering the attacks elsewhere, and erase the changes to time that were being made.

The idea greatly agitated the Doctor and through his pacing and babbling about it, the Companion quickly came to understand why. The problem was that the Doctor would need to connect with it himself, allowing him to untie time and stop the war himself.

"No one should have that kind of power," the Doctor told him, almost as though he was pleading for another option. "Least of all me. I can't. I _can't_..."

The Companion thought about it for a moment and knew there was nothing he could say that would persuade him otherwise. So instead he just put on the vinyl that they had enjoyed before, and asked the Doctor to dance to the Moonlight Serenade. When he refused, the Companion danced alone with an imaginary partner, which looked sufficiently silly to make the Doctor change his mind and join him.

"You are a terrible dancer," the Companion informed him, surprising the Doctor enough to laugh, "But there's no one else here to dance with me. That's really all that matters, isn't it?"

It was a point that seemed to hit home, that it didn't matter whether he felt worthy of the task or not, there was no one else there to perform it, though the Doctor didn't say so out loud. He just looked sad at the thought of that.

They moved in a circle around columns around the central console, just for the length of the record, and when it was done, the Doctor had a determined look on his face as he went to the console and, with a noticeable moment of hesitation, put in some coordinates.  


This took the TARDIS to a red planet, in a rocky valley under the shadow of a great white palace, and the Companion walked along behind the Doctor as he trod the path towards a large black circular disk which was hanging in the air like a gong.

"This is the Untempered Schism," the Doctor explained as they approached, very slowly. "I said I’d never go near it again."

"What is it?"

"It’s a window into everything. Pure power over all time, used by Time Lords to awaken to their true path in the universe. It leads to the central nexus of all of time and space, the same power that fuels the TARDIS. She holds within her a link to the outer fringe of it, but this... this looks right into the heart. Pure unbridled power over creation. Enough to burn the universe to ashes." There were tears in his eyes as they grew close. Then the Doctor suddenly turned to the Companion, quickly, tense from head to toe. "What if I-?"

"You won’t. I know you won't. You will do the right thing, you always do." On impulse, the Companion grabbed his hand and squeezed it. "If this is the only way to stop the war... you have to. No one else can do it."

"I knew this was going to happen a long time ago. As a child. It told me this would come to pass. That I would..." the Doctor confessed, eyes downcast. "I ran and vowed to prove it wrong."

The Companion released his hand and stepped back. Something was already starting to happen. The vortex appeared to be bending time and space to reach out towards the Doctor. That in turn started to draw in their surroundings with it, everything warping with its power. After finally taking a deep breath and then looking up, directly into it, the Doctor span around to him and his eyes were bursting with bright white light, so much so that the Companion had to avert his gaze, blinded.

"Guilty," something that sounded like the Doctor but wasn’t all his voice erupted from him, "Both guilty. Can’t be untangled. But I... I can’t. Alone. Alone forever." The light seemed to crackle and grow dark, his face twisting with a rage that made him ugly. "Why? Why should I sacrifice my own kind? We owe the universe nothing. Kill the Daleks. Kill. Kill! Kill! We are Time! Gallifrey must prevail! We do not die! Lesser beings... not worthy. Not worthy of the exchange! We are so much more! No I won't!"

The Companion could feel the blackness seeping around him. It felt exactly like the lonely void he had always sensed as present within the Doctor coming to the surface. "Doctor!" he yelled. "This isn't you, it's your despair! You are the Doctor! An the Doctor doesn't kill, the Doctor heals! Please! Listen to me!"

On impulse, the Companion ran to him and clasped his hands to his head, staring right into the holes where his eyes had been, trying to communicate the goodness he knew to exist back into him somehow. It was agony; immediate and absorbing. His hands burned like they were pressed against molten lava but he couldn't pull them away.

"Doctor, please..." he sobbed, breathless with pain.

In that moment, the Doctor came to, seeming to be himself again. "It told me I would end Gallifrey... that I would destroy the Time Lords... I don't want to do this," he gasped. "But you're right... I... I must... I am... _the Doctor!_ "

The Doctor roared and the sound burst out across everything in an instant, enormous, chasmic, infinite, engulfing all the universe and time itself. Caught directly in the flash, the Companion screamed along with him and then everything whited out.

*

The Companion came to on a beach, in a place with no red sky, no palace, and no schism. Instead the sky was blue, the ocean ahead of him even bluer, and the sand shone golden under the two suns above.

There was a man kneeling over him. He had short, cropped hair, rather large ears and was wearing a black leather jacket.

"Awake now?" he asked, in a strange, broad sounding accent.

The Companion frowned and nodded, slowly, utterly perplexed.

"Good. Thought you were a done for a bit there. Most humans would have been. I don’t quite know... ah well, never mind." He stood up and blocked the light over the Companion coming from the suns. "Just wanted to say thank you. You gave me that little extra push I needed. The universe, well, it’s looking fine now. Fantastic even! No more Daleks. No more..." He paused a moment as if to fight back a swell of emotion and cleared his throat to cover it. "The great Time War’s over and a lot of planets and populations are back to where they should have been all along. I hope you don’t mind me dropping you off here but, well, I’ve been thinking that it’s time to go it alone for a while. Safety; that sort of thing. Humans aren’t really made for this sort of life. Oh but, before I forget," the man held up a familiar green velvet coat, "I wanted to give you this. You got rather attached to it so... seems only fair. Not really my style."

After an awkward moment, the man draped the coat over him.

"This isn't Earth, but its the place you said you needed to be. Three moons, two suns. 5090. Could only mean here. See, I _was_ listening. So, yeah... good luck with your mission. I really hope it works out for you. Bye then."

The stranger walked away from him and, as he watched, disappeared into the TARDIS without so much as a glance back.

Then it was gone, and the Companion realised that he was no longer the Companion.

He had been left behind.

He winced though as he realised that his hands were hurting, and when he looked, he discovered that both of them had been tightly wrapped in bandages. When he slid one of the bandages up a little to see what had happened, he gasped at the side of molten red and orange cracks, with some strange white light roving around under his skin, like a creature beneath an icy lake, threatening to break through the cracks. It burned horribly and he had to cover it up again as quickly as he could.

When he squeezed his eyes closed, the light was there, thrashing about as if it were caged, and he was above the schism, falling, falling, falling...

"Doctor!" he cried, curling his hands to his chest, but of course, there was no response.

 _He had been left behind._


	4. The Trainee

For a long time, all he could so was stare at the space where the TARDIS had been. He couldn't help but hope, desperately hope, that he would come back. All just a big mistake, no harm done...

If he had had the presence of mind in the moment, he might have called to the man - _was he another companion? No... he was the Doctor, with a new face... a regeneration_. He would have cried out for him to stop and not leave him there, all alone. He wouldn’t have just watched, dumbly, and let him go.

Those few moments would be a recurring feature in his dreams for some time afterwards.

For some time, the man with no purpose and now, no name, couldn’t do much more than stare at the coat he'd been left with and sit there, on the sands. He felt so incredibly strange, inside and out, like his skin had taken on a new texture, or he was sitting upside-down on a sideways planet. The source of it was his hands, still writhing and sore, but he didn't want to look again because what he'd seen so far had scared him.

Eventually, the tide started to come in and he had to move or else be submerged. So the man with no name finally carefully shook the sand from the velvet coat, slung it over his shoulder, and headed off into the rocky fields beyond. He looked up at the sky, seeing the three moons coming into view as nightfall approached, and he swallowed hard, wondering what he was going to do next.

The sleeves of his suit jacket were irreparably scorched, he realised, presumably by whatever had burned his hands, so he dumped it. The velvet coat was far more pleasant to the touch anyway, and it smelled of his life on the TARDIS with the Doctor, which was soothing.

That was a life he knew he had to leave behind now. Yet he could feel the Doctor's absence like a hollow had opened up inside the fabric of his being. He still couldn't quite believe, after all they had seen and done, that he had been left behind like that.

The Doctor had once explained that time travellers often had a natural kinship and a propensity to cross paths, since the act itself was transcendental to their own personal timelines. That was how he kept running into the same people all the time, or so the Doctor theorised. The nameless man wondered if that also meant a greater sense of loss when parting. It certainly felt that way, the feeling of absence settling in his gut like rats gnawing away at him.

With the sky growing dark, it started to get very cold very quickly. He took shelter under a large set of rocks with an overhang, just as the skies parted and it began to rain and storm.

Unexpectedly, he found himself crying. He was scared. The realisation that he was completely alone and lost hit him hard, and though the burning sensation in his hands was starting to temper, it was still there, threatening to overwhelm him at any moment.

Not too long ago, being alone had been something he was all too used to, he remembered. It had been a source of solace even for a while, making it a comfort zone he’d had to fight to be free of to function. Now he felt like a small child that had been abandoned in an unfamiliar place.

He put a hand on the wetch, still attached to his temple, and tried to will it to find more memories for him. Sometimes it responded when he actively reached back and he hoped that it sensed his urgency enough on this to help him out with something. _Anything._

Although he knew that the planet he was now on had something to do with Gray, the details were still far too fuzzy to know if this was where the man himself would be, or if this place related to saving Jack. Another small part of a conversation came to him, about an Agency of some kind. Unfortunately, he didn't get enough context to know who had been speaking to him.

Daylight came around again faster than he expected and, with it, a welcome warmth that took care of the water left over from the rainfall that had passed over in the night.

The man with no name finally crawled out of his hiding, but almost immediately came face to face with the barrel of something which looked very much like a weapon, even if he couldn't tell for sure.

Over it he saw the face of an older man with dark skin and piercing eyes, both fixed onto him with an assessing gaze. "Who are you?" the stranger asked, his voice deep and with an accented lilt.

He definitely didn’t recognise this person; a feeling that was patently mutual. The stranger wore a long black jacket with white trim at the cuffs and collar and insignia that meant nothing to him. Then he caught sight of something on his wrist... a brown wristband.

The wetch creature on his temple dug in more and he started seeing something forming in his mind. The wristband... _Time Agency_...

"I said, who are you?" the man in the uniform asked again, and pressed the weapon against his neck. "Last chance."

The wetch pulsed again and the words came from his mouth before he even realised it. "Gray Thane." That had been Gray's full name, he finally remembered.

That name seemed to click with man with the gun. "Ahh. We've been expecting you." One eyebrow quirked up and then the gun was lowered. "Where’s Agent Five?" Before he could respond, the man put his gun away and tutted. "Never mind. Back off stalking your brother again, if his last message was anything to go by."

The man with the weapon held out his hand and, now that the threat had been removed, he accepted it, gingerly, though he couldn't help but wince as he was pulled up onto his feet.

"Sorry, son. We'll find some nanogenes and get those injuries you have sorted out in the infirmary. Glad you decided to join us. I hope you’re ready to begin training right away." The man in uniform started walking away through the trees, clearly expecting him to just follow him. "There’s no time to waste."

"Training?" he called out, half hanging back out uncertainty.

"Was it not made clear to you? I authorised your rescue on the condition that you sign on with the Time Agency."

"Oh." Seeing the suspicion in the man’s eyes, the man impersonating Gray Thane nodded and straightened his back. "Yes, Sir. Um, sorry Sir."

"That's better. Now then, I have been debriefed as to your previous encounter with the Bane. In fact, I'm counting on that having made you strong enough to get through this training. We have lost a lot of people to the Time War, and frankly we need all hands on deck to clear up all the loose ends and mess left behind."

He nodded, and focused again on the brown wristband on he had spotted. That was important... it was something he had wanted to find, or needed as part of his mission. That _must_ mean he was in the right place.

"I’m ready," he claimed, bolder for knowing that he needed to understand why the wristband was important; that it might be the key to his whole mission.

The obvious change in his demeanour earned him a wry smile. "Good. Let’s quickly get the preliminaries out of the way. With our ranks diminished, I’ve just been confirmed as Agent One because I’m the longest serving of us left with the highest tally of successful missions. Ergo, I will oversee your training. From this point on, your name is irrelevant; revoked. You will be your Trainee designation. Make it to graduation and you will be granted the title of Agent, and tasked with fixing critical time rifts and recruiting others who can help us rebuild this operation. That will be your entire purpose. If you fail the training, you’ll be frozen in a storage pod and buried on this planet, nameless and forgotten. Do you understand?"

The unnamed man nodded, sharply. Clearly there were a lot of stakes here and he couldn't afford to mess it up.

"Very good, Trainee. We have a good half an hour's walk ahead of us." He paused a moment, to snort and shake his head. "I wish you had been dropped here a little closer to the complex. Trust Agent Five. No consideration for others at all."

Although the Trainee was glad to have some sort of direction, he couldn't help but throw a glance or two back towards the ocean, unable to quite push down the sense of regret he felt at the life he was leaving. There was no choice but to put that aside now, but there was no denying that it hurt to know that he'd probably never see the Doctor again.

All too soon, the ocean had receded into the distance and they were wandering along a landscape of brown rock and hardy plants. Ahead was a large complex, like a military camp, protected by a shimmering golden energy dome that reminded the Trainee a little bit of the light that had burst out of the Untempered Schism.

There was no turning back, he knew, and as far as the Trainee was concerned, that was going to have to be fine. He _had_ to do this, whether he wanted to or not.

*

The nanogene therapy that they used as standard for the healing of wounds in 5090 did absolutely nothing for his hands. According to the designated facility medic, Agent Six, there was only one possibility as to why; this was a temporal injury. Exceptionally rare, she said, but it had been known to happen when someone was injured by energy that existed outside of time and space. It was something she had read about in the abstract, but never actually encountered.

She found it interesting but informed him there was nothing that could be done, not here or anywhere else. This was likely to be permanent.

Agent Six recommended that he make another choice; leave now. It was going to be twice as hard trying to get through the training with injuries like that, according to her experience of it, and frankly she didn't think he could do it.

In all honesty, the Trainee strongly considered he argument. That was until she implied that, as far as she was concerned, he had only been pulled in as a favour, because someone called Captain John was still too sweet on Captain Jack. The Trainee asked her to repeat what she had said, his thoughts derailed.

"The Agent who brought you here. He and your brother Jack have a lot of history. Surprised he didn't mention it, he's telegraphed it enough to everyone else here."

_Save Jack_. So Jack was Gray's _older brother_. Another piece of the puzzle slotted into place.

"Captain John is Agent Five," he muttered, working it out in his mind based on what Agent One had said when he'd arrived.

"Riiight," she drawled, as if he was stupid.

"And Captain Jack is-?"

"Agent Seven. That's why One's been keeping the Agent Eight title on ice for you, baby brother." The redhead gave him a very hard edge of a look. "But tell me this: with that alien echinoderm meshed to your head, and your hands stuck the way they are, do you really think you have what it takes?"

She was challenging him as a help, he realised. Agent Six didn't actually want him to leave, she wanted him to be honest with himself.

"Yes, I do," he told her, with more confidence than he felt. "I _will_ do this." It didn't matter what he wanted, what mattered was completing his mission, now that he knew that he was on the right path.

She gave him a respectful nod at that, smiling at the choice made. "Alright then. Good luck Trainee."

From there, the new Trainee was taken to a barracks, where he was given a locker for his clothes and a plain green uniform. Agent Six stopped by and provided a pair of leather gloves as well, which weren't strictly speaking in the trainee code, but which she had procured just for him on medical grounds.

There were nine other trainees, none of them very old. The Trainee counted five men and four women, all very different sorts of people, from a few who looked like they were military and very well trained, and a few who looked a lot rougher, recruited from who knows where.

Each of them were given a number badge, and the Trainee was a bit disturbed to find that the shape of his, 8, gave him a flashback to walking towards the Ferosian stasis cube, that infinity-esque symbol on the door drawn in the same way. He was pulled back from the pit his mind attempted to throw him into, however, by a jealous remark from one of the other recruits about the favouritism on show, since the rest of them had numbers which were much higher.

The Trainee didn't say anything about it, instead choosing to shrug and try to keep his head down. The last thing he needed was to start making enemies in his first week.

They were assembled outside of the barracks with Agent One standing before them on a podium. He informed them that they had all been recruited by Agents Two, Three, Four and Five, based on their achievements and their willingness to sever all ties to home, for the good of mankind. This was to be a fast track, he told them, but it would be the hardest thing any of them would ever do; he promised mental and physical challenges, combat training, intensive lessons in temporal physics and time coordination, as well as courses in history, severe sessions of stress training and, for those who made it through all of this, field missions unlike anything they had experienced before.

The Trainee acted the part of enthusiastic recruit, but in the back of his mind, he worried. A lot of his memories had been restored, along with most of his muscle memory skills, but reading and writing were still a problem for him. He briefly cursed himself for not talking to the Doctor about it when he had the chance; he might have been able to help, or... maybe not, he supposed, his trust in the man he had thought of so highly a little bit battered by subsequent events.

There was also the issue of his bed. Despite his best efforts, one of the things he had still not quite managed to get past was sleeping anywhere other than on the floor, underneath, where he could see the boundaries of his space, on a hard floor, as he was accustomed to. The Trainee tried, as hard as he could, to sleep the same way as the others in the first few nights there, staring up at the ceiling of that big dormitory, but it was no good. The space was too cavernous. So he started to crawl underneath as soon as he thought the others were asleep, and tried his best to wake up before any of them did, so he wouldn't have to answer questions about it.

The lack of sleep didn't bother him too much. He suspected that the wetch was helping him to achieve deeper sleep in faster time, in its efforts to keep healing his memories, meaning he needed a lot less time resting than the others anyway. With time on his side due to all the early starts, as soon as the Trainee was given the means to log into into the Time Agency's library system, he resolved to spent his time learning to read again.

Agent Six caught him quite early on, as a fellow early riser who liked to run around the perimeter of the base first thing and then research upcoming missions before the space could get busy. Since she was also the type to snoop, the Trainee owned up that the reason for the wetch on his head was due to an incident which had taken a lot of his memories away. He confessed that he was trying to catch up, and to his surprise, she actually started to help him by downloading some remedial lessons for him to go through privately, tutoring and testing him.

Every morning, he worked on it, and despite his early impressions of the woman as something of a hardass and a cynic, he found Agent Six was actually quite encouraging. He even started to wonder if there might be a bit of a spark there that was worth pursuing, given that he couldn't even remember the last time he'd been with a woman, or a man, or anyone really, if he ever had. The concept was abstract to him now but there was something about him that awoke it in him. But she was happily married to Agent Ten, which he discovered when that Agent returned from a field engagement, and the Trainee saw a whole new, softer side to the woman when he saw her run to greet her wife as she arrived back.

Unexpectedly, watching that sparked something in his memories, and the Trainee knew that there was someone he cared for like that. The face wasn't there, but the feeling was. The grey-blue coat owner... that was who it was, he was certain.

From then on, he thought about that often, that someone might be waiting for him, and the thought really helped get him through the increasingly gruelling physical and mental challenges put in his path daily.

A few of his fellow trainees took his early morning additional sessions as favouritism, but the Trainee didn't particularly care if he was making friends. He had one single focus in mind; getting a wristband of his own, and then finding his way home, to seek out Captain Jack and complete his mission.

The gruelling months of training stretched on and on, depleting him, but the Trainee didn't give up. He ran through obstacle course after obstacle course, and went on run after run, doing whatever he was told to do. He memorised reams and reams of data and extrapolation methodology, and, with his reading level finally back at the level it needed to be thanks to Agent Six's help, he completed all of the intricate history challenges set. He even managed to get through several team challenges, much as he hated them. All in all, he kept himself to himself and did what he needed to do to succeed. With every day, he became more certain that he could do it.

That was when the ravine incident occurred.

One of the more jealous trainees, Twenty Four, who was leading the team challenge expedition along the cliffs thought it would be funny to quietly relocate their camp in the night as he slept, leaving Trainee Eight behind in his tent. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that he'd been all alone when a katabatic wind front passed over the area, the warning signal that would have alerted him having been taken by the others to the new camp, causing him to get blown right over the side of the rocky ravine and down to the bottom.

He lay there for some time, alone, hovering between life and death. It was a strange experience, the spiral of emotions that came with feeling that he was going to die suddenly unlocking a surge of new memories that pulled him back from the brink.

Finally, he remembered a name... _his_ name. _Ianto Jones_ , which sounded very strange and alien to him, for not having heard it for so long. He knew that he had been born in 1983 in Cardiff Royal Infirmary. He also knew that the last birthday he had celebrated had been his twenty fifth, which gave him a likely year of departure. He knew that he had worked for an organisation called Torchwood, both in a London branch, and then in a Cardiff branch, though the details as to what he did for them remained lost. Most importantly, he remembered Captain John, aka, Agent Five, in his stupid red military band jacket, with his inexplicable period sword, and how he had been angry enough to run at him, causing his wristband to activate.

That had been how it all started. He knew it. None of this had been intentional at all, it had been an accident.

Drifting with all of these new thoughts and memories, the Trainee was surprised when the wetch finally detached from his temple and slowly slid down the side of his head, leaving a trail of slime blood. It dropped onto the rocks beside him, all curled and dried up, and the trainee was truly sad to see it go. Though there was no way to restore everything of what he'd given up inside the cube, the wetch had really come through for him in the end. And now, he wondered if it had actually saved his life as well.

Time wore on and the twins suns above made him think of the Doctor, the blazing light in his eyes the last time he saw the face he associated with him, that power surging through him. The Trainee pulled off his gloves as well, as the discomfort in his hands actually provided him with the focus he needed to stay awake. He was fairly certain he had cracked his skull open, and at least three of his ribs of the right side of his body were badly broken, but focusing on the pain his hands helped somehow.

The burning energy in them was crawling, ready to burst, energy flowing like water, and suddenly it felt like something was whispering to him in the well of his ears. He had no idea of what that meant until he reached down to cradle the pain in his ribs and a burst of golden light suddenly blinded him, like a sunspot falling into his eyes.

All at once, he could see his own ribs within a crucible flash of time, as if their entire existence, from dust to life and dust again, was compressed into one singular slither of an event, which he found he could tug at, like winding string around his finger. He reversed them in his mind to a time of wholeness and then let go. The pain went away instantly as he did it and he was shocked to press down and discover that they were fine, as if nothing had ever happened. 

He checked his head and, finding blood, pressed his eyes closed and tried it again, finding a singular layer of all time within that one small space of his skull, and then winding back to a time just before the injury occurred, fixing it.

Although he was now physically stable, he was still pinned under the rocks that had rolled down with him. After a few more hours, a drone seeker located him however, and he was rescued by the team and brought back to the base. With some nanogenes put to work, all of his scrapes and bruises were healed up without any fuss. When the Trainee asked Agent Six about his ribs, he was told there was no issue, not even any bruising. He had felt them crack, and could see the internal bleeding under his skin when he'd been lying there...

Somehow, whatever was stuck inside his hands could move time. Only in a small, localised area, but _time_ all the same. It was incredible... but also terrifying as a concept. He worried that, just winding back until before he had been injured was only delaying the inevitable, but there was no sudden moment of resurgence; his ribs and head remained perfectly uncracked, so that wasn't how it worked he supposed.

He was derailed from his thoughts when Agent Six asked him if he wanted to heal the wound on his temple where the wetch had been latched on as well, since it would definitely leave him with a big cross-shaped scar, and the Trainee refused. He had a feeling of fondness for it after so long, after what it had done for him, and didn't want to forget it.

The Trainee said nothing of Twenty Four's actions after he was released from the infirmary, finding it more convenient to claim an error with the warning system appeared to have occurred than to get any of his fellow trainees in trouble.

As for his hands, the Trainee decided he was going to need to do a lot of reading in the library to try and figure it out. When his initial enquiries didn't not yield much in the way of information, he decided to try a bit of experimentation on his own time, just for peace of mind.

While locked into one of the bathrooms, the Trainee gave himself a small cut on his thigh with his field knife. Nothing large, but enough to bleed a little. Then he took off his gloves and hovered one of his hands over the wound. The light sparked behind his eyes again and the Trainee grasped at the threads, the compressed layers of time that were suddenly accessible to him, and sent his skin backwards by no more than a minute, erasing it.

In the following days, he quietly ran a few different experiments whenever he was sure he was alone. He used the knife to mark some lines in the door of the bathroom, and then concentrated on reversing the damage. Next, he saved an apple he'd been given in the mess hall for dessert and hid it away in his locker for a few days to use as a test subject, and when he returned to the decaying piece of fruit, he'd managed to rewind it to full health. The Trainee bit into it to be absolutely sure, and his heart skipped a little when he found it juicy and ripe again.

A further curiosity arose; could he wind in the other direction? He put the apple down again and delved back into the light of its existence, this time pushing forward. It returned to what it had been, decaying, but there was a point there at which the lines of time wrenched back against him. The feeling of wrongness in trying to push furhter forward was like a thick, disgusting liquid pouring down his throat, sickening him, and he had to pull his hand away completely.

The apple was barely recognisable, it was so decayed, and the Trainee resolved to stop trying this out, too unsettled by it. As practical as the applications might be, whatever was working through his hands was wrong somehow and he _felt_ it... contrary to the natural order. He had no idea if there might be serious repercussions to the fabric of space time but it worried him.

If the sense of wrongness had not been enough to keep him from experimenting any further with it, hearing that some minor time fissures had been detected within the base certainly convinced him not to use it anymore, if he could possibly help it. It was too much of a risk.

He held to that, until there was an accident on the training tracks a few months later. That cocky idiot, Twenty Four, had missed a step on one of the obstacle sections and managed to break one of the hurdles in his landing, a piece of which impaled him through the stomach. Nineteen was the only other Trainee out with them, so he'd sent her running to get help and, when he inspected the damage, decided that he had no choice.

With Twenty Four protesting all the way, he forced him to lift up off the spike, blood rolling out everywhere. Once free, the Trainee took off his gloves and put hand hands over the wound, calling that bright gold light forward again to reverse time in that area of his body. When it was done, most of the blood had reversed into the man's body, and even the hole in his tracksuit had repaired itself. But it left the Trainee's hands burning more than ever before, and he flopped onto his back, whimpering, the sound of Twenty Four freaking out distant in his ears.

It might have been a mistake to do that, he reflected, but at the same time, he couldn't have stood by and watched someone bleed to death, even Twenty Four.

He was fully expecting to face some difficult questions, maybe even face some sort of investigation as to his abilities, possibly leading to restrictions on his ability to serve as a Time Agent. But beyond finding him to thank him, Twenty Four never shared what had happened, and he didn't face any questions, as he'd feared.

The Trainee didn't have cause to use it again in his time there. Life returned largely to normal and, every day, the training became easier, as his grasp of space time mechanics and his physical fitness hit the levels expected of him. Despite two drop outs in the ranks, whose fate was unknown, the remaining trainees all received approval for progression.

Finally, he was officially a designated an Agent.

Agent Six was the first one he told, excited to be able to say it. She smiled, and nodded, and then asked him if he would consider finally sharing who he really was.

That was a gut punch. He stared at her, shocked, as she told him that she had harboured some suspicions, and so checked his DNA. He wasn't a relation of Javic Thane. He wasn't even from this century, according to what she had learned. However, Agent Six had come to like him all the same; enough to want to see if he could stay the course and make it through. If he didn't, he'd be frozen anyway, so there didn't seem to be any harm in it, to her thinking.

But she did want to know who was, at least.

"My name is Ianto Jones," he confessed to her, his voice quivering a little. "I didn't mean any harm. I just needed to get home... to Jack. This was the only thing I could do."

She kept him stalled for a few moments, but in the end, she just smiled. "Ianto Jones? Interesting."

"Interesting?"

Agent Six smiled, enigmatically. "There is a time-locked nameroll of Agents, which carries every original name, across all of time. It's kept to ensure that a central timeline is preserved; to make sure we don't deviate too far. I managed to get access once and, well... I used it to get my girlfriend in as a Trainee. It allowed me to prove to Agent One that she was destined to join us. The rest is history. Gray Thane is definitely listed... but I have also seen the name Ianto Jones."

"How?" he asked, shaking his head with surprise.

She put a hand on his shoulder, warmly. "Who knows. But regardless, let me be the first to say congratulations," she said. "I'll see you at the graduation ceremony."

He walked out of her infirmary like a man whose whole perception of things had been shifted. The Agent couldn't fathom how it was possible.

In the absence of answers, he continued on, enjoying the ceremony of the graduation ceremony a great deal, since he really felt he'd earned it.

When it came to the next phase of work, where all the newly graduated trainees had to choose a partner for their inaugural missions, Agent Eight chose Agent Twenty Four as his partner, because even though it wasn't a warm relationship, they had come a long way and there was a respect there now.

As for his mission to stop Gray and find Jack, it remained on his mind throughout. His strong understanding of time, its mapping and manipulations, allowed the Agent the grace of patience though. He knew that the graduate-level wristband that he was provided with was not quite yet the thing that he needed.

This was a limited device, closely monitored, their first set of expeditions intended as a final hurdle to full acceptance. He did not have the ability to go off-stream from very specific missions that were pre-determined by Command until he had proven himself. The Agent knew he needed one with full privileges, which he could actually program himself, so he knew he had to play along a bit longer.

After ten months of base training, and after three months of closely monitored testing missions out in the field, which were actually more like real missions that the other Agents didn't want to take on, Agent Eight was finally officially confirmed. He was given his long sought-after wristband, coded to his genetic makeup, unusable to any other. It was a huge moment for him, his pride at finally having achieved his goal tempered with a worry about what he would need to do next. 

In the back of his mind, there was a quandary forming. He could go back now, find Earth in his year of departure, figure out what he was supposed to be doing. But, after everything, he liked the life he'd found here. He wanted to be a Time Agent.

He came to the conclusion that he needed to come clean. About who he was, and what he needed to do; at least then, he might be able to return afterwards.

After a lot of wrestling with his conscience, he went to see Agent One in his private office for a quick word. The Agent and sat down with a slightly nervous expression on his face, feeling already like he was in trouble.

"What's wrong son?" Agent One asked him.

"I think it's important I tell you something. I'm very sorry that I wasn't honest with you from the start, but... when we first met, I gave my name as Gray Thane. It was a lie," he confessed. "My name was Ianto Jones and I was born on earth, in the year 1983. Agent Five displaced me from my time. I'm very sorry for the deception, it really wasn't something I planned. I wanted to tell you because now I need leave to complete a personal mission in the 21st century. It is extremely important but, I don't want to lose my place here. I want to return and work for you afterwards, Sir. All of this, it has become very important to me."

He honestly thought that Agent One would understand; maybe that he'd even be impressed that a time-displaced nobody from the 21st century had managed to make the grade, with no 51st century enhancements whatsoever. Maybe that was why his name was on the name list that Agent Six had told him about, he'd thought, feeling that Agent One might give him a chance. The conversation had certainly played out that way when the Agent had run through it in his head.

Unfortunately, the reaction was not what he hoped. Agent One exploded with anger at the deception and he then said that he would be locked up his deception while an investigation was carried out as to his reasons for infiltrating the operation. The Agent knew that would mean his wristband was confiscated, and there was a high chance that he would be dropped completely; frozen and placed into storage, to be forgotten.

So as Agent One reached for his comms device to call for assistance, Agent Eight pushed him back from it, hard enough to hit the wall behind him. 

He stood there for a moment, breathless. He didn't know exactly what he meant to do, only that the conversation had been a mistake and he regretted it. That he had to undo it somehow...

The Agent removed his gloves again and grabbed Agent One's head, forcibly trying pushing the light through his skull and into his brain, rewinding time again across his entire brain, though this time he did it more out of panic rather than through controlling it specifically that way.

His hands burned from the effort of it, like lava was erupting from them somehow. Only the briefness, the need to only take him back a minute or two, stopped it from being too much altogether. It was a wrench all the same, and he released him with a gasp of pain.

The Agent hurriedly picked up his discarded gloves to try and contain the fire again, dazed by his own actions, his forehead covered in sweat. He started to back away, guiltily.

Agent One blinked a few times and then his gaze fell back onto him. "What's wrong son?" he asked.

"Um-"

"You asked to see me, yes? So go on, have a seat. What's on your mind?"

The Agent felt absolutely terrible, not only due to the pain in his hands that he was having to try not to visibly react to, but because he knew that doing that had been very selfish. He still didn't know if there might be unforeseen side effects to manipulating time in such a way. For all he knew, he could have easily killed the man.

"I just wanted to say... thank you, Sir. For giving me this chance," he said, forcing a grimace of a smile. "It's just... been great to have a purpose, again. Truly."

It wasn't a lie. Despite how hard it had been, particularly in those first few months, the Agent really was grateful for all that he'd seen and learned in the course of his training. Although he had been happy enough travelling with the Doctor, he had surprised himself by how much working so hard to meet all the new challenges thrown up by the Time Agency had brought a different sort of contentment into his life. Where before he had had no purpose beyond the abstract, this life felt useful.

"You know, despite a few mistakes along the way, some serious cases of insubordination that admittedly drove my predecessor mad, I will still say that your brother was one of the finest Time Agents we ever had. It's been gratifying to bring you on board as well. I think he'd be proud of you."

A sudden opening occurred to the Agent that he decided to push, and he kicked himself for not having thought of this before. "Agent Five mentioned that he located the time-stream-present version of my brother," he said, putting his learning to good use. "Would you allow me to try and recruit him back into the Time Agency? I recognise the dangers of historical travel without evidence of time fissures but... I'd like to try."

Agent One sat back in his chair for a moment, pondering this. "Interesting. Well, I have a few urgent missions coming up. Complete those assignments and I'll consider it."

"Thank you, Sir."

The Agent bowed his head as he left and, as soon as he was outside of the office, he fell against the wall of the corridor. He finally allowed the pain to register on his face, his hands shaking, his body heaving. After a few moments of fighting past it to pull himself together, he ran straight to the bathrooms to pour cold water onto them, and he looked at himself in the mirror above the sink.

He had a vague memory of doing the same thing not long before he'd left Earth, when he'd been a man called Ianto Jones. He knew that the person staring back at him was not that man. The x-scar on his temple stood out prominently against the slight pinkish tan he'd acquired from all of the training outdoors under the twin suns. His hair was a burst of unruly curls now, thanks to the humidity, and he could tell that his cheeks were more hollow, having lost weight thanks to all of the gruelling physical challenges he'd gone through on the training tracks. He definitely looked a few years older than the memory image he had, which was actually only the tip of the iceberg given his true age, but it made him pause for thought all the same.

There really was no going back, at least not permanently. He couldn't pick up his old life, whatever that was. Not with everything he'd seen and done. Not with his hands the way there were; a permanent reminder that he was not some normal person anymore.

No, this man staring back at him in the mirror was a Time Agent. And when his mission with the brothers was completed, he made a promise to himself, then and there, that he going to do exactly what he said he would to Agent One.

He was not going to dwell on the long blue-grey coat that kept appearing in his thoughts, a fluttering vision of someone he knew he had loved... he was not going to go back to his former life, whatever that had been.

No, he would _save Jack, stop Gray_ , to honour that final wish of his former self, but then he would return and work for the Time Agency, for as long as he was needed, come what may.

This was his home, his time, now.


	5. The Agent

Cardiff, Wales, Earth. The place that Ianto Jones had been born. The place he had lived a life he could hardly even remember now.

The name of the city sounded kind of beautiful to the Agent's ears even before returning, and it was even better seeing this old city in person. It was like discovering a new world completely.

Following official confirmation of his designation, he'd finally been given full access to the Time Agency's records system, allowing him to call up a file on Agent Seven. He had been surprised that the image on file showed a face that immediately overwhelmed him with recognition, even though he couldn't find a single recognisable actual memory to explain why. The errant Time Agent, who was noted to have adopted the name Captain Jack Harkness for historical fieldwork, looked a lot like the image he had in his mind of Gray Thane, just a little older, and significantly more handsome, in a roguish sort of way.

They didn't keep a lot of images or recordings on general files in order to avoid the sort of problems which might arise if such information fell into the wrong hands, but seeing his face at last gave the Agent a new sense of clarity and focus. Jack was no longer an abstract, he was a person; a person Ianto Jones had wanted to save.

According to the timeline calculations from his wristband, the closest he could safely come to his original time of departure was two months after, to protect the timeline from potential paradoxes.

The moment he landed, on the roof of the Millennium Centre to ensure a safe vantage point away from prying eyes, he immediately did a scan of the area to see if he could detect the signal that would be coming from Captain John's wristband. If he could, then it was likely that he and Gray were already there.

Thankfully, there was no sign of it. He'd almost certainly arrived first, and hopefully that meant there was time to figure out what to do now.

Although he knew that he should proceed to the Torchwood Three base, a sudden reluctance settled in his stomach at the thought. It was all so real suddenly... this life he'd lost, and he had no idea what the people who knew him before would think. Instead he decided to take a walk, to first reacquaint himself with Cardiff and the 21st century a little bit, to see if it jogged any more memories.

It wasn't long into his wander into Cardiff Central that he spotted a woman in a black leather jacket running with a gun in her hands, which struck him as strange. "Jack, it's a shapeshifter," she yelled, presumably into the earpiece that was revealed as her hair blew in the mind. "He could look like anyone now, but he's leaving a trail of black blood."

 _Jack..._ Given the illegality of general gun usage outside of special agencies in this time period, it wasn't a stretch to assume that this woman was part of Torchwood Three. He ran along after her, grateful that it was night time and therefore pretty easy to stay out of sight.

"He's changed but it's definitely him," she shouted as she ran. "He's heading towards Trinity Street."

The Agent watched as she tracked the blood trail into a bin area, and he wondered where her backup was, as she was clearly cornered. Inevitably, the being she was tracking, some sort of alien with red eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth, made a leap for her. The Agent spotted immediately that she had dropped her gun and was in trouble.

There was nothing else for it. He grabbed his own weapon, a period compliant service pistol he'd obtained specifically for this mission, and shot the alien in the back of the head, blowing its brains out. 

The alien collapsed onto the woman and she rolled it off, clearly disgusted at all of the black gunk coming out of it. She turned to find the source of the bullet and he realised he had come a bit too close, given the expression of surprise that came over her face.

"Ianto?" she gasped, gaping at him.

"Gwen?" another voice called out almost at the same time, and the Agent caught sight of another man approaching her from the other direction, gun in hand, a purposeful look on his face.

Immediately he recognised him as Captain Jack Harkness, but something lurched in his chest as he recognised what he was wearing... the long blue-grey military coat.

It was _the_ coat... the one that had been the first memory he'd regained for himself, unaided, whilst travelling with the Doctor. It was also probably the reason he'd been left with the green velvet one he always wore now, being such a breakthrough that even the Doctor had made note of it.

He stepped backwards into the shadows to get out of sight, completely flustered by the unexpected swell of emotions. It all made sense in that moment; Jack had been important to Ianto Jones, not just as a leader or a friend. His past self had cared for him, perhaps even loved him. That was why Ianto Jones had been so fixated on saving him, and why that had lingered so strongly, despite everything. So obvious really, when he thought about it. He couldn't believe he hadn't guessed it.

Watching him interact with the woman he'd called Gwen caused some intense feelings that he was completely unprepared for. The last thing he wanted was to have to face the man in the coat now, so the Agent didn't wait around to be spotted.

He ducked off into a side alley and, with a quick swipe of his wristband, transported himself safely back to his starting position, up on the roof of the Millennium Centre near the bay. After a few moments spent collecting himself, he took up position in a spot with a view over the Plass. The water tower visible ahead was recorded in historical records as the main entrance for the underground Torchwood Three base, or 'Hub' as it was generally referred to. It made sense to keep watch there while he figured out his next move.

He scrolled through comms signals in the area to see if he could hone in on theirs, and it was remarkably easy to locate the right frequency and unencrypt it. "Tosh, anything on the CCTV in the area?" he heard the woman, Gwen saying, the sound of a car engine roaring in the background.

"Just a side view of someone in a coat with a gun, but it's too dark to get a match," another woman with a slightly softer voice replied.

"We can figure that out later. For now, Tosh, Owen, I need you on clean-up asap," the Captain ordered, with the clear authoritative air of a leader.

"Why can't Gwen do it?" the nasally voice of a man, presumably Owen, whined in response.

"Ohh no you don't," Gwen jumped back in. "I'm already running late for my Hen Party thanks to this, and now I've got to get a pint of alien blood off me."

"Hen Party?" the woman called Tosh said. "Oh, that's tonight...? That's nice."

There was an awkward pause, and the Agent could tell that she sounded a bit disappointed not have been invited to whatever it was.

"Owen, I'm giving Gwen a ride back to her place to get changed," Jack said, moving the discussion along. "Alien shapeshifters are never good news. If there's one, there's usually more. Get the body back to the base for examination, but be careful."

"Ugh, fine."

The line cut and the Agent sat back for a moment, thinking. He watched the water tower, and no more than a few minutes later, two people appeared walking away from it, presumably coming out of the chameleon loop that kept the entrance invisible to civilians. It was a short man, who walked along with a clomping sort of swagger, who had to be Owen, and a petite woman with black hair, who had to be Tosh.

There was no guarantee that the base was now empty, but he was tempted to take a look inside all the same. It would be possible to disrupt the internal cameras and mask his presence if necessary. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like it would be better to do this properly; to introduce himself by having a good reason to be there, as a positive starting point. It was going to be weird no matter what.

After all, much as he felt there had been something between Ianto Jones and Jack, he didn't know for sure. It might have been one sided, or they might have parted on bad terms. There was a very possible chance that Captain Jack might even react badly to meeting him now, for one reason or another.

The Agent decided that it would be best to provide a demonstration of who he was now, rather than randomly wander in as if Ianto Jones was actually back.

Fortunately, Captain Jack had already given him a good opening on that. And so the Agent set to work.

*

The Agent returned to the site where the male shapeshifter had been left, covered over with tarpaulin and placed well out of sight of civilians. He took a scan sample of its genetic sequence and ran a scan of the immediate area. There didn't appear to be any others, to he retrieved the body directly and transported it into the Hub's operation bay.

This task accomplished, he set off the alarm intentionally, knowing it would mean Owen and Tosh had to turn back to figure out what had happened. Then he took a gentle stroll through the facility, cataloguing any small impressions that might indicate some latent memories as he went. It made his hands twitch to see that the place was a bit of a mess, with unwashed coffee cups, overflowing bins and pizza boxes stacked all over the place. He couldn't imagine how Ianto Jones had comfortably worked in such conditions.

He busied himself by interfacing with the Torchwood Hub's data archive with his wristband, seeking out any references to Gray Thane. He wasn't listed as a next of kin to Jack, which was interesting. In fact there were absolutely no mentions of him, no clues to be found anywhere. That in of itself was a clue.

The alarms being switched off told him that he had company.

"Ianto!" Tosh gasped as she entered through the cog-shaped vault door. "Oh my god, you're really back!" She hurried down towards him.

He didn't quite manage to shut down his interface and the screen was still scrolling information as she came close, naturally catching her eye.

"What were you doing?" she asked, her pretty face falling a little, wariness setting in.

"Excuse me," he replied, with a smile. "I suppose that was rude of me. You must be Tosh."

"Um- yes?" She looked him up and down with a newfound sense of unease, and then she flicked her gaze back towards Owen, who was holding back, regarding him with suspicion.

"I'm not an alien shapeshifter," the Agent assured them, with a smile he hoped would put them at ease. "I put the dead one on your autopsy table. I couldn't find any more in the vicinity."

"Right, so, Ianto's here and he's acting weird," Owen said, abruptly, and the Agent realised that he was speaking into a comms device, more commonly called a phone in this time period. "I don't know, but you might wanna- right." The call ended with a beep. "Jack's on his way."

"You are Ianto, right?" Tosh asked, with a heartbreaking sort of openness. Though he remembered absolutely nothing about her, he had a distant sense that he'd probably liked her before. She seemed smart and she was very attractive as well.

"I'm here because Jack's in danger," he said, sidestepping the question.

"So what else is new. Blimey, where did you get that coat?" Owen asked, as he simultaneously removed his own jacket and slung on the back of one of the chairs. "Charity shop find? I mean, it's vintage, I'll give you that, but-"

"Owen!" Tosh scolded him under her breath.

"It belonged to a friend," the Time Agent told him, with a slight warning edge. Tosh he had probably liked, but as for Owen, he just seemed arrogant and annoying.

"You look so different," Tosh said, with a nervous chuckle, ranging close enough now to really catalogue all the things which were evidently different to what she remembered.

Her curiosity was both disarming and uncomfortable to him. So before she could ask anything else, he retreated. "It's important that I speak with Jack in private. I'll wait in his office."

It wasn't until he was inside the office itself that he realised that he'd gone there on muscle memory alone. There were still definite flickers of Ianto Jones there, in the shadowy recesses of his fractured mind, and he didn't quite know how to feel.

Not knowing how long it might take, he hung up his coat on the coat rack and took a look around. The Agent wasn't one to pry, but it looked like Jack kept a lot of information stored in physical formats, rather than digitally. Either the man was hiding things, or he had just adapted remarkably well to the time period. The Agent considered looking more closely at some of the papers and photographs kept hidden away in his cabinet drawers, but he thought better of it.

There were photos here and there on display in the office, but none of the faces were familiar to him, save for Jack himself. There were none whatsoever of Ianto Jones, which he supposed meant that they weren't actually all that close, or that if there had been something between them before his departure, it had been new.

Above all things, he wanted Jack to trust him. So he put aside his natural instinct to cover all angles, and instead of rifling through anything, he perched against the desk and picked up one of the old books that had been left on top of it. The smell of the pages made him smile, reminding him of some of the old first editions the Doctor's TARDIS had carried, and of how there had been a time when the words had become so jumbled. Even now he worried about discovering gaps in his reading vocabulary, silly though it was. It was nice to be able to pick it up without that fear at least.

No more than ten minutes later, Jack came into the office like a whirlwind, and the Agent could tell he had run up the steps from the way he was breathing. He stood at the threshold for a moment, as if he couldn't quite believe his eyes.

The Agent stood up, straightening his period waistcoat as he did, and he put the book he had been thumbing through back where he'd found it.

"Captain Jack Harkness," he said, by way of greeting. Even though it must have been obvious that the Agent knew full well who he was, it felt important to put some distance between them at this stage.

The expression which started soft, looked him up and down carefully, and then went very stern. The way his eyes lingered on the Agent's wristband did not escape his notice. "Who are you?" Jack demanded.

"My designation is Agent Eight. Yes, I'm with the Time Agency - clearly. I'm sorry for the surprise visit, but I believe this is important. Now I know it'll be confusing-"

"Stop. I just want to know one thing," the Captain snapped, looking strangely pissed off. "Are you, or are you not, Ianto Jones?"

There was a note of sadness in his voice which struck a similar chord in the Agent, and he found he couldn't be dishonest about it. "I... _was_ ," he replied.

After a lingering moment, Jack staring at him with widening eyes, the Captain suddenly moved in as if he was going to grab a hold of him.

It startled the Agent and, almost without thinking, he fell back into his combat training. With a swift sweep of his legs and an elbow to the chest, he had Jack flat out on the floor. Immediately realising that it have been a bit of an overreaction, he stepped back and looked away, uncomfortably.

"Ow," Jack said, more for effect than because it had hurt. He sat up and regarded the Agent with a guarded annoyance. "That was not exactly the reunion I was picturing."

The Agent said nothing. He kept his distance, wondering what the Captain would do now.

"How long has it been?" the Captain asked, suddenly very serious.

"Since I joined-?"

"Since I last saw you." Jack leapt back up onto his feet and dusted himself off, with an indeterminate look of approbation. 

The Agent pointedly did not reply, as he knew it would only lead to further questions. "Captain, the reason I'm here is related not to you, but to your brother."

Jack went completely still as he said it, his concerned expression turning into a frown. "What?" he mumbled.

"Gray Thane. I don't know what your history is, but I do know that he is coming here to kill you. I believe he's using Agent Five's wristband to travel through time to do it and, allowing for the buffer to prevent timeline crossover, it is mostly likely that one, or even both of them, will arrive here within the next month or two. You need to be on your guard-"

"Stop, stop, stop," the Captain interrupted, shaking his head. "You know where Gray is?"

"Agent Five located him. An outpost, I don't remember what he called it. It belonged to a species called the Bane. They captured Gray and held him there, for many years I think. I believe he blames you."

Devastation filtered over Jack's face, and he staggered back a little as if he'd been punched.

"Gray," he breathed, inwardly, his eyes sliding closed.

"I'm sorry," the Agent said, as he could tell how much the mention of him had hurt Jack. "I'm sure this is hard to hear. I wouldn't have come here if this information wasn't important though."

"Would you- would you give me a few minutes?" Jack asked, and staggered to his desk to sit down. "I- I need to think."

The Agent gave him a nod, and then retrieved his jacket from the rack and smoothly slipped it back on, like a battle coat. He didn't even really know why he'd taken it off in the first place, except to try and put the Captain at ease, which was probably never going to happen anyway based on this first interaction. "I'll be downstairs."

The Agent walked back along the hollow sounding walkway and down the steps to the main area. Tosh was busily tapping away at her computer. "You were accessing the archives."

"Nothing nefarious. I was just trying to see if you might have some very specific information I've been looking for."

"Your search criteria was wiped," she said, with a clear note of frustration. "Hmm."

"Well I didn't find anything," he replied, as assuringly as he could. "No harm done. I'm sorry I set off the alarm. I just thought it better than you getting all the way to into town and then having to turn back."

"That was intentional?" she said, turning to him sharply. "I'd better look into some system upgrades."

"I agree. In fact, if at all possible you should prioritise setting up an internal monitoring system for time-fluctuating energy signatures. I have reason to believe there will be another attempt to infiltrate." He thought of the way the wristband had been welded to Captain John's wrist, and the tiny bomb that had been inserted into his body by Gray. "I suggest an automated systems lock. Freeze access to all systems completely if something is detected. I can provide the calibrations you need."

"Alright." There was a spark in her eye as her fingers flowed over the keyboard like the tide, so fluid and natural. A pang of something like regret overcame him as he watched her work, summoning up pages of code, already rewriting things on the fly. He had a strong feeling that he had admired her skills quite a bit once.

"I'm sorry I don't remember you," he said, perhaps a little abruptly, from the way she turned to him with surprise.

"Do you remember any of us?"

"No, not really," he sighed. "Time travel, aliens, various stuff. You know."

Tosh nodded. "Your voice is different. Rather, your accent. It's nearly gone."

That slightly surprised him, and he supposed it was probably down to the time he'd spent with the Doctor. "It's been a while for me."

"I'd like to hear about it. I really am glad you're okay, Ianto," she said, with a sweet smile. "Oh- can I still call you that?"

After a moment of thought, he decided that it didn't feel quite so strange coming from her. It actually sounded like a name that might have belonged to him, rather than some other person he barely remembered. "Sure."

"Great. It was such a shock, you disappearing like that, but Jack was adamant that you'd be back at some point. We kept your flat on for you. Maintained the bills, all of that sort of thing. I know it's only been a few months but, well, I thought you'd want to know."

Not quite knowing what to say to that, the Agent gave her a curt nod.

"Right," Owen suddenly burst in from the operations room to one side. "It's an alien called a nostrovite. Gross, symbiotically mating aliens. Had a sack of pre-fertilised eggs behind its teeth and everything. Deee-sgusting. Lucky it didn't bite anyone, that would have been bloody awful." He took of his white lab jacket and put his coat back on.

"Where are you going?" Tosh asked.

"The case is solved. It's eight pm. I'm going home already."

"Oh. I suppose it is quite late," she conceded.

"Gwen's out on the piss. And I can't even bloody have a drink anymore. That means I am officially calling it a day."

"See you tomorrow for the wedding then," Tosh said.

Owen paused at that, his lip curling with disgust, rather unnecessarily.

"You are coming aren't you?" she pressed.

"You ever seen a dead man dance?"

"I've seen Fred Astaire in Easter Parade. Twice." She suddenly looked a little sheepish. "Late night TV."

Owen just rolled his eyes. "Really not my scene," he said and walked backwards out of the Hub entrance before spinning around with a whoop, rather than just walking out like a normal person.

"Is he always like that?" the Agent asked.

"Oh no he- well... okay, a lot of the time. It's hard for him though. Being dead and all."

"Dead? As in... _dead_ dead?"

"It's a long story."

The Agent rather thought it must be, but as it wasn't his primary concern, he put that to one side for now. "It would be quickest if I interface with the console and feed in frequency marker information that you can use to build a new-"

"Tosh," a loud voice rang out through the Hub like a buzzer had gone off, and they both started and turned around to find the source. Jack was out of his office and standing on the upper walkway, leaning on the railings and looking down at them, ominously. "You've done enough for today. You go on home."

The look on his face apparently spooked Tosh, as she shut down what she was doing and grabbed her coat with barely a moment of hesitation. "Bye Ianto," she said, ducking her head shyly.

He gave her an acknowledging nod and watched her go. There was a clear rising tension in the air now, with only Jack left in the Hub, and the Agent wondered what he was thinking. The look the Captain was giving him, his eyes not moving from him as he went across to the steps and went down them, was both purposeful and intense, but the Agent gave no indication of concern over it. If the Captain wanted to play a game of interrogation, he was perfectly able to hold his own.

When Jack was no more than a few feet from him, he stopped, and slowly his eyes roved all the way down to his feet and back up again. "I'm sorry," he said, and the softness of his voice caught the Agent by surprise. "You caught me off guard."

"I'm sure this is difficult," the Agent conceded. "I don't know your history with Gray. I just know that, for whatever reason, he wants to harm you."

"And you want to stop him."

"I thought I made that clear."

"Even though you don't seem to remember me. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense." The Captain was edging closer. "So what, John recruited you? Is that the story you're going with?"

The challenge was unmistakable, but he chose not to rise to it. "Not at all. I haven't seen him since Gray took him."

"How old was he?"

"Gray? Around twenty or so I'd say." Jack was testing him; it was obvious. "You don't need to interrogate me, Captain. I will tell you what I remember." He realised that the Captain had managed to come much closer, within touching distance even, but the Agent had the desk behind him so there was no way to move away without it being extremely noticeable.

"Right now, I'm interested in what you remember about me... about us," Jack said, in a curiously husky tone.

The Agent searched his face, even more handsome in person than he had been in his Time Agency profile, trying to decipher his intentions. He said nothing, but couldn't disguise his tense anticipation as Jack moved in even closer, all pheromones and heat.

"Don't you remember... _us_?"

His heart fluttered a little, his cheeks flushing, and the Agent had to look away. It was too much all at once.

"I'm sorry," Jack breathed, so close the Agent could feel the brush of his breath on his cheek.

The Agent only realised why when he felt a sharp stab in his neck, and realised that he'd been injected with something. Jack grabbed onto him, pinning his arms to prevent him from grabbing his pistol, or activating his wristband, as were his immediate instincts.

He fought against the effects of whatever it was for as long as he could, but it was no good. It was a fast acting agent and the Agent was out light a light in seconds.

The last thing he felt before it all went black was Jack lowering gently to the floor, cradled in his arms, and a momentary heat as lips brushed against his temple.


	6. The Stranger

When he awoke, his muddled thoughts instantly placed him right back in the stasis cube, as if everything after that had been nothing more than a dream. He turned his head aside and, once again, there was the apparition of figure coming to him... "Doctor?" he mumbled, blinking against the light around it.

His vision cleared and the dark cell around him came into view. The Agent gasped and bolted upright, remembering what had happened. A hand went to his neck where the needle had been stuck, immediately surprised at the unexpected sensation of heated skin on skin.

He realised that his gloves had been taken from him. So had his wristband, his gun, his coat and he was barefoot as well. He immediately slid his hands into his armpits to provide some cover, hating how the burning sensation within them felt so much worse without the second skin of his gloves to contain everything. He knew it was partly in his mind, but it didn't make it in any better.

The Agent looked aside again to the figure observing him. No, this was certainly no Doctor. It was just the Captain, standing there on the other side of the cell's transparent screen with his arms folded, his expression hard and defiant.

"Well that was a tacky move," the Agent said, shaking his head, both annoyed and embarrassed to have fallen for it.

"Sorry, but I needed to know you are who you say you are. There are plenty of species of alien out there who take over bodies, or use mind control, or shapeshift. Some of those types do it by killing the original-"

"So this is for my wellbeing, then?" the Agent scoffed.

"Believe me, if I found out you were one of those, you wouldn't be waking up now." From the way he bared his teeth as he said it, the Agent could well believe he was serious. "Some of the scans I ran on you came back scrambled, but the DNA samples checked out at least. You're human. Spot on match for Ianto Jones."

"If you needed genetic verification, I would have cooperated. For the last time, Captain Harkness, I came here to help you. If you don't want my help, then fine. Give me back my possessions and you'll never have to see me again."

The Agent thought he saw a flicker of hurt pass over Jack's features at that, but it disappeared so fast he might have imagined it.

"Tell me what happened to your hands," Jack said, a touch gentler.

The Agent went silent at that. He had no intention of dredging any that part of his life up for anyone's amusement. He closed his eyes and just breathed in and out for a moment, the memory evoked of how it happened always like striking a match behind his eyes. He had to put the fire in his mind out before it threatened to overwhelm him.

"Do they hurt?" When he still didn't get any answer, Jack pressed almost right against the glass screen, as if he really wanted to get closer to him. "Come on Ianto, talk to me." He waited for some indication of a response, and when none came, he sighed heavily. "I imagined you coming back a thousand times. Every time the Hub door opened up, I hoped it might be you. I kept thinking, what if I missed my chance? What if I never saw you again? But now you're back and I'm left wondering... if I've still missed my chance."

He sounded so very genuine, the Agent couldn't help but soften a little, though he was still angry. "I wouldn't be here if so," he told him, coming closer to the barrier. Then, staring directly into his eyes, he told him, "When Ianto Jones had to forget everything, the only thing he refused to let go of was you. Saving you was more important to him than remembering his own name." He watched as his words hit their mark, Jack's eyes widening at the implications, and then he added, "But at this moment in time, I don't know you. We're strangers and you don't know what I'm capable of. So I will ask you one more time, to return what you took and to let me go."

That broke the spell, and Jack stepped back, his countenance darkening. "Will you leave now if I do?"

The Agent pointedly didn't answer.

"Then you're staying right here for now, where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to pick up some food for us both but when I get back, I'm going to need you to start talking to me. Okay?"

"Dinner and a show, Captain?" the Agent said, turning Jack's previous edge of flirtatiousness back on him with a slight warning edge.

Jack left him there. As he did, the Agent's gaze settled onto the cell door lock. He could absolutely leave if he wanted to; just a small tweak to guide it back through time to when it was last open and he'd be free. It was perfectly possible to wait until the Hub was empty and then walk out of the cell, find his belongings and leave. The message was delivered after all: he'd warned Jack about Gray. He hadn't gone into the details, but he had told him the threat was incoming.

Unfortunately he knew he couldn't let it rest at that. Technically, he hadn't stopped Gray yet, so the mission wasn't over. It wouldn't do - he had to stay put for now, but the Captain's actions thus far made it very clear that he was going to need to play it smart.

So he sat down in the corner of the cell, put his hands in his pockets and allowed himself to zone out completely, into the empty fugue space grown through his years of captivity. If there was one thing he could do with great precision, it was that. The camera would show him sitting there, completely still, eyes devoid of anything, as if gently daydreaming. Nothing suspicious or concerning to see.

Eventually Jack returned and slid a white paper bag into the cell through its items transfer box. Despite being assured that the food was a previous favourite, the Agent had no idea what it was from the smell. Jack told him it was takeaway Chinese food but that didn't evoke anything.

He needed his gloves to actually fetch it and eat, but he didn't want to say it. So instead he just eyed the bag and stayed where he was.

Jack pulled up a chair and made himself comfortable in front of the cell, eager to tuck in. After a moment, he noticed that he was the only one eating. "It's not drugged or anything, if that's what you're thinking," he said, a little put out.

"I'm not hungry. Now, you wanted to talk. Here is what you need to know," he said, getting right to business. "Agent Five is going to be used as some sort of diversion. I saw Gray put a device in his stomach, a bomb I would surmise. It was small, had flashing lights on it. He also welded his wristband to his skin and attached a monitoring system. I'm afraid I don't know what Gray is planning exactly, except that he was using the wristband to travel through time. The only other thing I remember is that it he mentioned something about," he paused to clear his throat, "Burying you alive. I'm not sure why that specifically."

The wheels were turning in Jack's head as he spoke. He went faraway for a few moments, then put his food aside, as if he could no longer stomach it.

"Were you close?" the Agent tried.

"I let us get separated," Jack said, in a way that confirmed that they probably had been. "So, he's not wrong. Anything that happened to him _is_ my fault."

"Even if so, it doesn't mean you deserve-"

Jack barked a sour laugh out at that. "How do you know? We don't even know each other anymore. Isn't that what you said?"

The challenge he was throwing out was obvious but the Agent didn't rise to it. Jack was obviously hurting and it made him confrontational. In his shoes, the Agent thought he might be the same. It couldn't be easy to hear something like this.

"Your meal's getting cold," Jack muttered, not meeting eyes, and then he picked up his chair and his leftovers and walked away.

The Captain clearly needed time to process things, which was understandable. The Agent was still not exactly pleased about having been sedated that way, or about hanging around in a cell, but at this point there seemed to be no point in rushing him. He only had to hope that Gray wouldn't make his move in the time it took Jack to figure out what to do.

After a few minutes, the Agent's stomach growled at him and his eyes fell again on the bag of food left behind in the box. He really did want to try it.

With an irritated sigh, he got to his feet and, back turned to the camera pointed at him from the corridor, he removed his waistcoat. By wrapping it around his arm and using his teeth, he was able to tear some strips out of the lining to create some makeshift bandages for his hands.

The rest of the item discarded in the floor, he finally went to collect the food that had been left for him, and sat down in the corner again to eat. He was actually a bit sad to discover that it was incredibly good, as it led him towards wondering about all the times he must have had the very same thing in the past, with Jack, maybe Tosh too.

The Agent shook off his morose thoughts. They weren't helpful. So instead he just focused on getting as much enjoyment as he could out of the meal, eating every last bite of it with care. Once it was gone, he sat there for a little while, running through pending tasks; first, retrieve his wristband and coat, second, secure the Hub from any further incursions, third, keep watch over the Captain.

With nothing else to do, he went onto autopilot. Being inside that space sent him into a strange state of mind and he begin to run through old sequences around his new cell, which was not quite a cube, but close enough to walk the perimeter in the same way - _sequence 12; 50 times clockwise, 50 times diagonally - sequence 87; 6 times clockwise, 34 times counterclockwise, 60 corner diagonals to draw 15 diamonds; sequence 9..._

He continued until he felt sleepy enough to rest. The Agent then rolled underneath the bunk that was bolted to the wall and, though he could feel eyes on him through the camera that was blinking away outside the glass, he resolutely didn't give it a glance before he tucked his hands in against his sides and went to sleep.

*

The following day saw the Hub abandoned by all but Owen, which the Agent discovered when he was the one who came to wake him up. Apparently Jack had told him put on his Doctor's hat and go take a look at his hands.

The Agent politely refused the request. "Just some minor burns," he told him, making no attempt to sound particularly convincing. "Nothing of concern, I assure you."

"Riiight," Owen drawled. "Well, whatever."

"Where's the Captain?" he asked.

"The _Captain_ is busy."

"Is he at the wedding Tosh mentioned yesterday?" If that was the case, then there was no need for the Agent to hang around in the Hub; he would be far better going to keep watch in case Captain John or Gray showed up. He added, before Owen could respond, "I'm curious, why didn't you want to go?"

"Uh, well- someone's got to babysit the inmates," Owen blustered, unconvincingly.

"Tosh was clearly angling for a date with you."

He knew he'd hit a nerve instantly. "Nah. Doubt it... you reckon?" Owen said, sounding like a normal human being for just a moment. "Huh. Well, like I said, dead men don't dance."

"About that," the Agent said, and walked to the glass, his hands clasped behind his back, "How exactly is it that you're apparently dead but still walking around?"

"Why do you care?"

He shrugged. "I might be able to help?"

Owen laughed out loud at that, a mocking sort of howl that echoed along the corridor. "Oh, they got a cure for death where you've come here from, have they?"

"You'd be surprised," the Agent said. "How did you die?"

"I got shot. The nI got brought back by some weird thing. Now I'm officially just a walking bag of bones. These things happen."

The Agent thought about it for a moment. "A body is just a vessel for the consciousness, as you being here proves. So what if your heart was, let's say, exchanged?" Although he had initially asked on a whim, a curious inkling of an idea began to form in his mind at the concept of it.

"Uh, well not much help without some actual living blood to go around."

"Alright. The human body takes what, 8 units of blood?"

"More like 8 to 12."

"You are very short though," he bantered, feeling strangely at home with talking to Owen like this. "That's not much. You could definitely source enough. What if your body was pumped full of blood and your heart exchanged?"

Owen scoffed at him, looking both appalled and interested by his clear interest. "Brain death can't exactly be fixed."

"What if you were filled up with blood, and your heart and brain were both restored to a fully working alive state?" The Agent thought back to what he had done to Agent One, both the success of it and the guilt he felt at potentially risking his life. While he doubted it would be possible to extend his ability to an entire body, since it only worked very locally to where he hands could reach, he wondered if he might have stumbled upon a perfect test subject for some experimentation.

Owen stared at him through the glass, looking just a little a bit shaken. "Nah no good. Still got a bullet wound the size of a fist in my chest-"

"Then what if-"

"Look, unless you're trying to tell me that you have some alien device stashed away up your arse that can magically fix me, then let's not play a game of what ifs. It's pointless."

The Agent gave him a smile. "Well, it's not up my arse granted, but I might have a way to fix you."

The Doctor narrowed his eyes, assessing him. "You're just trying to get me to let you out of here."

"I don't need any help with that."

"Right, right." Owen rolled his eyes and started to walk away along the corridor. "Look, I've got an autopsy to finish off and a pile of paperwork the size of Everest, so I'll be back this afternoon," he called behind him as he went.

The Agent decided then that this was a good time to make a point. Since he fully intended to leave the Hub now that Jack was out of it, there was no point in hiding it anymore. He quickly let his thinly-bandaged hand hover over the cell's lock, reversing the specific section to a point in time when it was open, and then he stepped out into the corridor. "Owen," the Agent called after him, from outside of the cell. "I'm serious."

The look on Owen's face was actually comical. He sucked in a gasp and stood there staring at him, expression hovering between outrage and interest.

"What's the catch?" the Doctor asked, finally.

"No catch, except that you don't call Jack when I leave the Hub. Pretend you didn't notice."

For some reason, that quirked a smile at the corner of Owen's mouth.

"The Captain asked you to check my hands," the Agent added. "I've decided to cooperate. So let's go to the medical bay and I'll show you what I'm talking about."

That was all he needed to say to get Owen on his side. The Agent knew, perhaps better than anybody, that hope was a tool, in the right hands.

*

Although it had been slightly painful for both of them, proof of concept was very much obtained with the restoration of the two inch wide section of Owen's chest to a point in time right before it had been obliterated by a bullet. For a good minute or two, there was a living piece of flesh there, and Owen had felt it with every last nerve ending for as long as it took it to die off again for lack of a blood supply.

Agonisingly painful for the walking dead man, but when it was overwith, he had looked at the Agent like a man finding faith. Owen had held onto his wrists carefully to look at the roving cracks and burns across his palms, the light seeping out of the molten heat, all the while wearing the strangest expression. He had no words at all either, which seemed like it might be pretty rare for him.

When at last he had spoken, it was only to croak, "Fucking hell, Ianto. I don't even want to know what did this to you."

That had suited him perfectly well, as he had no desire to share the details anyway.

After that, the Agent had been free to go fetch his belongings from Jack's office. His coat had been hung up on the hatstand, his gloves in the pocket, his boots and socks on the floor beneath it, but his wristband and his pistol had been nowhere to be found. So once he had dressed himself, on a hunch, he returned the dial of Jack's safe back to a time when it had been turned to the right combination, and sure enough, both items had been stashed away in there. He had put his holster and pistol back on his hip, and then strapped his wristband back into place with no small amount of relief at its safe return.

To his surprise, Owen had appeared in the doorway to Jack's office with a carefully folded set of clothes. "You can't go to a wedding looking like that," he said, and handed the Agent the bundle. "Put this lot on."

That surprised the Agent, but he accepted it and took a look. He had been handed a formal suit, with a pink shirt and striped tie. Obviously this was Ianto Jones' spare set. "Thanks."

Owen had given him a wry nod. "My invite's in your jacket pocket. Have fun."

"Why don't you come along?" the Agent had pressed, lightly. "Tosh did seem pretty disappointed."

The Doctor checked his watch and pulled a face. "Bit late now."

Something about the way he'd said it made it obvious that he was actually more interested that he was letting on. So the Agent had just waited, silently, until Owen finally turned around with a put upon sigh and started to take off his lab coat.

It was a half hour cab ride to the wedding venue, but they made it with a few minutes to spare before the ceremony was due to begin.

The Agent didn't go inside, however, since he knew Jack wouldn't exactly react too well to seeing him out and about. Instead he gave Owen his invitation back and stayed outside, lingering in the gardens at a safe distance. The wedding was taking place inside a huge white marquee with big windows on all sides, so it wasn't exactly difficult to just keep an eye on it from afar.

He watched Jack, Tosh and Owen sitting together mid-row, one empty seat on the end of it next to them, and thought about how that might have where he'd have sat, as Ianto Jones, in another life. It was a strange feeling, like standing between worlds, still a Time Agent, yet feeling quite different dressed up in a suit, whilst also hiding from them as a stranger.

There was nothing for it though. It was what it as. So he stayed there, keeping a surreptitious watch from out of sight as the vows were done, the photographs taken on the green outside of the marquis, and as the sixty odd guests returned inside to be seated for dinner.

Suddenly, without any warning, there was a woman leaping on him, her eyes blazing red, her mouth filled with huge, disgusting teeth, like those of a piranha. She was screaming something about her mate. "I saw it! You killed him! You killed my babies! You monster!" she screeched, and he narrowly avoided a bite to the neck by kicking her hard enough to throw her off.

He went for his gun, but she managed to kick it from his hand before he could fire it, and it disappeared under the bushes. The nostrovite appeared to be in some sort of frenzied rage, throwing him about like a ragdoll, attempting to bite him. Before he knew it, they were well out of cover, and she was not letting up. The Agent continued to dodge her, trying to see her off long enough to find something else he could kill her with.

Unfortunately, some well meaning usher who had been outside having a cigarette tried to jump in, complicating the fight, as the Agent had to act fast to keep her off him. As he knocked the guy aside, the nostrovite ran at him and the ended up right next to the marquee, rolling about. He delivered another hard kick and pushed her off, but before he could get free, she grabbed him by his jacket and suddenly he crashed through one of the windows, right into the wedding.

The nostrovite leapt in after him, and he rolled to avoid her again. The Agent flipped onto his feet, ignoring the sound of guests shouting and scattering around them. Snarling, the nostrovite rounded again on him, and he delivered a heavy punch to the face and then somersaulted up onto one of the tables over her. Without missing a beat, she followed, and he hopped from table to table, knocking everything on them over in his haste, looking for something to kill her with.

When the creature made it onto Table 4, Jack flung himself at it and the two of them rolled forward and crashed right into the head table, causing Gwen, her husband, and all of her close relatives to scurry back as all of the flowers and glasses fell over. Jack delivered a good punch, but the nostrovite then just grabbed him by the lapels and flung him aside, causing him to skim over the head table and land right on the groom.

Now back on its feet, the nostrovite looked around for the specific person that it wanted to murder again, and when it spotted the Agent, it made another screeching run at him. Fortunately Jack had bought him enough time to make it to the wedding cake. He grabbed the big knife that had been placed for the happy couple to cut into it before their first dance later, and concealed it behind his back. When the creature leapt at him, he swung it around at the last second. The knife went straight into the nostrovite's chest, but it wasn't quite enough to prevent it from clamping down at the join between his shoulder and his throat.

They fell back together, narrowly missing the stand on which the cake was teetering. Pain bloomed and he realised that it wasn't going to let him go easily now that it had its teeth in him. That was when he saw the bride come into view with a huge green champagne bottle in her hand, which she smashed over its head. This pushed the alien down harder onto the knife in its chest, which at last seemed to finally do the trick, causing it to gasp out and then detach from his shoulder. Jack and Owen were suddenly there, pulling it the body off of him together.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Jack demanded, under his breath, as he helped the Agent up onto his feet.

"Observing," he said, and then spotted the bride right behind him. Turning to her, he said, "I am really sorry. It came out of nowhere."

To his great surprise, she flashed him a big, gap-toothed grin and shook her head. "I knew I saw you before." She moved in to hug him, which was unexpected, but he let her do it. "Bit of a dramatic entrance, don't you think Ianto?"

"Well my invitation got lost in the post, so-," the Agent said with a wry grin.

"Love to stand around talking," Owen cut in, "But I need to take a look at that bite."

"Tosh, help me get rid of this," the Captain said, already moving to pick the nostrovite up, with Tosh moving in fast to help him, even though she was definitely not dressed for it in her pretty purple dress. "Gwen, a distraction?"

"Rowdy guests. Right," the bride sighed, and her new husband was behind her, asking her what the hell was going on while glaring at Jack like he held him personally responsible. Gwen turned her husband back around and, as Jack and Tosh carried the nostrovite away together, and Owen led the injured Agent off to the men's toilets, Gwen's voice came on over the speaker system, telling the guests not to be alarmed. Just some drunk cousins - _definitely from the groom's side of the family._

Once safely out of sight, the Agent dropped his gloves onto the side of a sink and pressed his hands over his wound, concentrating on reversing time again. After a moment, both his flesh and his clothes were restored as if nothing had ever happened. He curled his hands into his chest for a moment afterwards, riding out the burning sensation in them.

"Jesus. How the hell does that work, anyway?" Owen asked, shaking his head.

"I don't know," the Agent admitted, breathlessly, as he grabbed his gloves and pulled them back on with a frantic note. "I just think about moving time and I see flashes behind my eyes, showing all times at once, guiding me on where to settle. Just in the limited spot though."

"Wait, so you're moving just like little localised bits of you through time? But doesn't the same thing just happen later then, like on a delay?"

"No. Like with your bullet wound, I took just that bit of you back to before it happened. Ergo, it instead just experienced a time with no one around to shoot you, so no injury happened. So far as my shoulder is concerned, it's five minutes ago. That nostrovite never got close, and now it never will. The injury never gets a chance to actually occur."

Owen's lips pressed into a thin line as the thought. "Bloody hell," he muttered under his breath. "Then what I want to know is, how in the hell are you going to explain all this to Jack?"

Before he could reply, the door swung open and three guests with dessert all down their fronts came in to clean up, which was just as well as the Agent had no answer on that. Their glares at the man who had caused it were unmistakable, so the two men made a swift exit.

The Agent turned to go to the exit, only for Owen to stop him. "Hey where are you going?"

He didn't stop to reply. Truth be told, he was a little more shaken than he wanted to let on and he didn't particularly want to unravel in front of anyone, least of all Owen. Beyond that, the prospect of staying, of sitting around at a wedding full of strangers, half of whom he'd just kicked wine all over, was even less appealing than having a public breakdown.

Instead he pointedly ignored the looks he received from venue staff who were on their way out with bins full of glass from the broken window, and went back outside. After finding his pistol and putting it back on his belt, he found a bench under a tree in the gardens that gave another good view of everything. It was also a peaceful spot, allowing him to regain his equilibrium a bit after all that unexpected excitement.

He hung around there as night began to fall, watching as the dinner reached a slightly early conclusion and the bar at the back opened to get things going again. The bride and groom had the chance to cut their cake - with a fresh knife - and then everyone gathered around for their first dance. That immediately kicked off a fairly lively party.

At first it was all strangers on the dance floor. Then he couldn't help but smile a little as he spotted Owen and Tosh finally dancing together. Jack was sitting watching them, arms folded, a fond expression on his face, which was endearing to see. If nothing else, the man clearly cared for his team.

A few songs later, he saw Jack finally get up from his place to cut in for a dance with the bride. Almost immediately, something about the way that they danced that caught his eye. There was an intensity to it that he hadn't expected, and an odd sensation of awkwardness came over him. It was as if he was prying on a private moment, the way the two of them were leaning so close, staring into each other's eyes. He wasn't entirely sure of attitudes to monogamy in this century, but even in the time he remembered, it wouldn't have been considered normal to seduce a bride at her wedding, at least not without the permission or participation of the groom.

The Agent could see said groom - he didn't know his name - over at the bar, watching them with a slightly sad expression. His mates seemed to be trying to cheer him up but the guy wasn't really paying attention to them, stuck on the scene unfolding on the dance floor.

A new piece of the puzzle, the Agent thought, but one which fit with the general impression he was getting in relation to Captain Jack Harkness. The more he watched him with Gwen, the more he felt certain that his own feelings, _Ianto Jones' feelings_ , had been largely one sided. Jack had been aware of them of course, enough to use to them against him to sedate him, but he suspected now that it was not reciprocated in the same way. Perhaps there was an affection, but his feeling for Gwen were painfully obvious.

It didn't matter, he told himself. It wasn't as if he had come here for a date, and if anything, it was better to know this now. It changed nothing, except that it would be easier to leave once Gray had been dealt with.

Eventually, Owen cut in to get his dance with the bride and Jack went to sit back down. Again, the Agent saw another layer of language to this dancing, not so intense as with Jack and Gwen, but certainly very intimate. Perhaps a little more guarded, but he could tell that this was familiar to them both. And this time, it was Tosh who was looking on with a slight sadness that she was trying to hide, poorly.

Apparently everyone in Torchwood were lovesick for each other. The Agent looked to see if Jack would dance with Tosh, honestly wondering if that would reveal yet another layer of intrigue as to who wanted to sleep with who, but the Captain was now gone from view.

He considered moving off to locate him again, but there was no need. Perhaps inevitably, Jack stepped out of the marquee, his eyes searching the darkness. The Agent made no special attempt to conceal himself, though he made an effort to seem relaxed, as though he were merely there enjoying the evening breeze.

"Had a feeling you'd be around here somewhere," Jack commented, as he approached. The Captain wasn't quite dressed for the slight sting of cold in the air, his greatcoat left inside. "How's the shoulder?"

"No damage, thankfully," he said, but offered nothing else; no other opening for conversation.

"You should come inside. It's not like you aren't welcome, Ianto." After a moment of awkward lingering, the Captain sat down next to him with a heavy sigh. After checking out the view ahead, into the marquee, Jack chuckled and asked, "Nice vantage point you got here. See anything you like?"

"Gwen is very beautiful in that dress," the Agent replied. "What's her new husband called?"

"Rhys. He's a good guy. They'll be happy together."

"Must be difficult for you."

"Difficult?"

"Your affection for her is obvious. Now with Owen, there's some heat between them there, but I would guess it's in the distant past. You, however, seem to be quite in love with her still. A wonder that you let her go like that."

The Captain stared at him incredulously for a moment, and then started to laugh. "In love with Gwen? No, not at all. The idea of her, maybe. A normal life... I don't know. I'm just a sucker for a wedding. Something about them... the dress, the dancing, the romance."

The Agent couldn't quite tell if he was being truthful, but he sensed he was - to his own understanding of himself, at the very least. The stated assurance that he wasn't actually pursing Gwen did provide some private relief though. Unfortunate though it was in the circumstances, something in him was drawn strongly to this man. It was undeniable.

"Care for a dance?" Jack asked, turning on his charm like a spotlight. He stood up and held a hand out in invitation, with a flourish.

"Not if you're going to knock me out again," the Agent replied, lightly. "Once was quite enough."

The Captain retracted his hand, suitably chastised. "If none of this had happened, you and I would be on that dance floor right now." He must have sensed approaching weakness, like a shark sees blood in the water, as he continued speaking with a husky ardour that was almost hypnotising. "I'd have a hand on your chest, on your heart. I'd have my face pressed to yours. I'd be thinking about kissing you, wondering if you'd let me, in front of everyone. We've never done that. If you did let me kiss you, I'd be whispering in your ear about taking a tour of the bridal suite. You'd hate all that satin, of course, but you'd let me take you there anyway-"

As he spoke, he leaned in closer and closer, and when he was almost close enough to actually steal a kiss now, the Agent asked him with a strained edge, "Do you proposition every stranger you meet, Captain?"

"Ohh, you may be many things, but you're not a stranger," Jack told him, firmly, and continued before he could be contradicted, "If you feel like you don't know me anymore, then dance with me. There's no better way to learn everything you need to know, right?" He waited there, still leaning forward, his heaved breaths lingering in the air between them. "Come on, Ianto."

Before he even consciously made the move, the Agent had slipped his gloved hand into Jack's. Smiling like a cat, the Captain pulled him up from the bench and against his body with no sense of a barrier between them at all. It was nice, swaying together, Jack's cheek against his, a hand over his heart.

"I've missed you," Jack whispered, into his ear. "I've missed this." And then, he added, "It was all my fault, what happened to you. My past, it always catches up with me and the people around me get caught in the crossfire."

"Don't," the Agent sighed. "I'm happy with who I am now. I've seen things I never dreamt I'd see. I have a purpose, a home-"

"Your home is here."

It was no good, Jack wasn't understanding what he was trying to say, not really. "It was once but... that was almost two hundred years ago for me," the Agent confessed, and he felt Jack's head jerk back a little at that. His cheek felt cold where they were no longer touching. "I don't recognise this place as home."

"Home isn't a place, it's the people you care about. You already told me that you never let go of me. So give me chance to show you why you belong here. Then if you want to leave, I won't stop you."

"What if-" the Agent said, but stopped himself and shut down.

"No tell me," Jack pressed, holding him just a little tighter. "What if what?"

"You may not like who I am now."

The Agent expected him to pull away at that, but instead a soft, dreamy expression came over the Captain's face. "Impossible," he said, as a statement of fact. He nudged at the Agent's nose with his own, heat rising between them. "I've seen you at your absolute worst. You've seen me at some pretty low points as well. None of it's erased. So I don't care what your name is, or how old you are, or anything else. I _know_ you."

They were going to kiss, the Agent realised. This was not what he had planned, or even considered, and everything was fluttering inside him as he could see it coming.

But something else suddenly buzzed in his mind, taking him away from the moment. The music coming from the marquis had changed, and he caught his breath when he recognised some version of the Moonlight Serenade playing over the speakers. In an instant, he froze. He pressed his eyes closed against the sudden intrusion of the Doctor into his thoughts, the happy memories tainted with a cascade light from the schism that he could never forget, lashing momentarily behind his eyes.

He snapped away from Jack, putting space between them. Whatever desire he had to lean in, to feel connected, was suffocated in that moment. It was overwhelming, both the memory of loss, and the anticipation of loss, colliding into one.

Jack obviously sensed that there was something more to his sudden change than mere rejection, and he too stepped back. "Listen, today has been a long one. We uh... we dumped that nostrovite in the trunk of the SUV so I should probably get it back to the Hub already. Don't suppose you'd lend a hand?"

"Do you intend to lock me up again?" the Agent pressed, though he did it with a wry smile, grateful that Jack was offering an easy way out to the situation.

"Only if you ask nicely," the Captain leered, but gently. He seemed to have taken the Agent's reaction as indicative of a need to step back a bit.

The Agent acquiesced with a nod, and then fell into lockstep behind him as Jack walked back towards the marquis and then took a turn into the car park. As they reached the SUV, there was a change of music to something more pop that elicited a round of cheers.

"Are you sure you want to cut the night short? Sounds like the party's just getting going," the Agent checked.

"I should get back. Someone's got to let the pterodactyl out for the night."

The Agent paused by the door. "Pterodactyl?"

To that, the Captain just grinned.


	7. The Teammate

He wasn't sure of quite when he started to genuinely think of himself as a member of the Torchwood team again. It didn't happen quickly, but rather came incrementally, with time spent working alongside them.

It didn't come in the first few days of his stay, as he worked closely with Toshiko on upgrading Torchwood's internal sensors to provide alerts for the sort of energy frequencies which would indicate an incursion from the future. She called him Ianto throughout, though, and that did start to stir a stronger sense of recognition.

Before he knew it, he had started answering to that name again without even really thinking about it.

That sense of kinship also didn't come when Owen came to him with his carefully laid out plans for how they would attempt to bring him back to life either, though it might have been the start of the shift, looking back.

In the weeks following his arrival, Owen went hard on calling in some old favours to get the right equipment, a quiet and sterile space and enough compatible blood for Project Resurrection. And much as he'd taken Owen for nothing more than an annoying idiot at first, and much as he often acted the part, Ianto had found a bit of depth beneath the rough and tumble exterior in the time spent planning for the experiment. The guy was frequently rude and egotistical, but not always. Mostly, he was just cynical and tired, and given that he was walking around unable to eat, drink, sleep or even have sex, Ianto could sympathise. He'd been there too, frankly.

Bringing Owen back gradually became less about testing the full extent of his ability to bend time and more about helping him, though it was never stated outright.

The Captain was suspicious about their private discussions, Ianto could tell, but he was doing everything possible not to push too hard on anything, treading endearingly carefully while Ianto was slowly learning more about his former life there, as if he was afraid to spook him and cause him to bolt.

Ianto was tempted to tell him what they were planning, but that would have involved trying to explain the condition of his hands. With Owen, it didn't really matter, since the guy just accepted it for what it was and didn't probe any further, but if Jack knew, there would need to be more explanation. Despite this, Ianto still strongly considered it.

In the end Owen was the one who encouraged him to keep it on the lowdown for now, even though Ianto was concerned about just the two of them managing the medical equipment with no extra bodies in the room to stand by in case things went wrong. Ianto supposed he had good reasons; Owen wanted to do it completely on the quiet, just in case it didn't work. That was understandable.

The plan became more elaborate than Ianto's initial thoughts on it had been, involving reversing time organ by organ on a timed movement, occurring as blood was pumped into Owen at high pressure, opening up all of the dormant arteries and veins. Ianto was a bit dubious but the outer epidermis and the muscles were already in a state of preservation from whatever was keeping Owen alive, so following the plan should lead to success.

Owen wrote the order list on a whiteboard in the quiet room of a private clinic he'd been allowed into overnight, and there was no turning back from there.

The dead man obviously knew that it was going to be agonising to him, like the worst leg cramp in history, but he faced it like a man. Ianto was sort of impressed, when he wouldn't want to be the one in his shoes.

After a certain point he wasn't wrong. Although, at first, Owen hadn't been able to feel anything in his dead nerves, he started to scream at some point between his lungs and his liver being wound back to a healthy state.

He wasn't the only one to find the process painful though; Ianto followed the order, pulling his heart into the time right before it stopped first, followed by his brain, then moving through each organ in order of medical priority, and the burning sensations in his hands grew almost beyond belief as he did. There really was no option to stop though, since it might cause the entire endeavour to fail, so he pushed and pushed, until he could no longer hear his own voice crying out, everything going distant, as if he were hanging suspended within the schism itself, blinded by the intensity of the light within.

Ianto didn't remember passing out, but when he came to on the floor, Owen was sitting on the side of the gurney he'd been lying on, listening to his own newly beating heartbeat with a stethoscope, tears rolling down his cheeks. And although they had prepared for him losing his memories to the moment the bullet hit and he died, he actually didn't; whatever was keeping him sustained seem to still be attached to him, needed or not.

What that might mean going forward neither of them wanted to speculate, but they could both agree that anything was better than being a corpse.

It took some time for them both to be able to stand and move, and when they were finally more or less ready to leave, Ianto sliding his gloves back on with several hisses of pain, Owen turned to him and said, "I know we're not the best of mates, never were, probably never will be, but... thanks Ianto. This really means a lot. Just... thanks."

He really felt like he'd done some good, as Ianto Jones, as a teammate, not as the Agent, or as anyone else. He'd paid for it sure, feeling utterly drained, his throat hoarse from screaming, but he knew now what his limit was as well. While Ianto hoped he'd never have to force it to that level again, kind of shaken by the experience, it was reassuring to him to know that he could go there if necessary.

Mostly, though, it was Captain Jack Harkness who brought Ianto Jones back into the team and made him feel wanted. There was no fighting that charm. Whenever it was turned in his direction, it was like being caught in the headlights of a train. Ianto gradually came to realise that he genuinely liked Jack, not because he was specifically trying to recapture some connection from the past, but for the growing synergy he was finding with him in the now.

Like the Doctor, Jack was a man in pain, often lost, often falling into sadness, yet there was an inner light there that he couldn't help but radiate towards.

He was also impressed by the patience being shown to him by the Captain. It couldn't have escaped Jack's notice that he had chosen a fairly compact crawlspace near Myfanwy's nest as his place to sleep, rather than on the couch in the Hub or his old flat, or how he zoned out sometimes when he was exhausted from helping to catch weevils or dealing with random alien artefacts coming through the Rift. It wasn't about special treatment, he decided, but more like having a CO protecting a member of his team, but he appreciated it all the same. As for his own growing feelings of closeness, that was just inevitable.

As Owen arrived in the Hub the morning after being brought back to life, he had, however, lay awake in his crawlspace though, worrying. Ianto wasn't sure what the reaction would be. It wasn't like Owen could claim to have woken up cured. Truth was important in such a small team, and Ianto was prepared to have to bat off questions, but Tosh and Gwen were just glad to have Owen back. Jack asked him to come to his office, which made him brace for an argument, but once there, he was surprised to find that Jack actually didn't want to push him on it. He just told Ianto that he wanted him tell him how he did it, but only when he was ready.

It made Ianto reflect, suddenly, on a particularly tiring mission, when Jack had actually helped him up into his crawlspace and Jack had lingered there, before telling him that they'd had plans for a date, right before he'd disappeared.

At the time he said it, he'd thought of himself only as an Agent, and his immediate reaction was that he didn't want to honour that; finding it superfluous to his purpose there.

_Ianto_ , however, had thought about it frequently since. And so, whilst in that office, expecting to be grilled over Owen's return to life only to have Jack hold back, he decided that it was time to approach having the conversation he'd been putting off; to finally own up to Jack as to what had happened to him. And the date that had been offered would, he hoped, be the perfect chance.

So he asked Jack to plan the date they would have had, and finally he leaned over to where Jack was sitting, behind his desk, and kissed Jack's cheek, promising to answer his questions on everything.

Jack kept the details of his date plans to himself, but he told Ianto the very next morning that they'd be leaving at six for their date, so he should be ready then.

When the appointed hour came, Ianto went to fetch his coat from the stand in Jack's office, but when he got there, he stopped and stared at it for a little while... maybe, he thought, it was time to leave it behind for an evening. Just be Jack's Ianto, no more than that. And so he went without it, for the first time since returning to Earth.

The date was at an expensive steakhouse restaurant on the opposite side of the quay, so they walked along together along the side of the bay, with the skies turning red over the ocean. Then, once they had their food order in, they were immediately having a good time together, Jack telling outrageous stories and making him try out drinks that he couldn't remember ever having tried before, though he probably did.

Once they'd eaten and were suitably tipsy, Jack took him next to an old cinema called The Electro, which he said Ianto had used to have a soft spot for, even though Jack had never actually taken him there himself until now.

Unfortunately, that was there it ended. Before they even made it through the queue, Tosh rang in to report a weevil attack a few streets away, ending the date prematurely and sending them on a run into the sewers after it.

The creature was a fast one, and a little smarter than many of others of its kind. It kept ducking into the shadows, until it finally made a lunge for Ianto and, with a heavy swipe of its claws, tore a big wound from shoulder to chest . Jack shot the weevil in the back as it tried to run then, but it still got away.

He ran to Ianto with undisguised fear in his eyes. "Hold on Ianto," he gasped, seeing the blood seeping out everywhere. "I'm gonna get some help-"

"Jack, it's okay," Ianto croaked, holding him back from leaving him. "I can fix this." He removed his gloves and held both hands over the wound, pulling time towards him again and then sending it back, repairing both the injury and his suit at the same time. Ianto didn't quite close his eyes completely this time, and he saw the expression of shock that came over Jack, his face bathed in the golden glow, the unnatural white fire reflected in his eyes as he witnessed it.

"Wh- what-" Jack said, breathlessly, his chest suddenly heaving as he stared. "What did you do?" He gently pressed his hands over Ianto's, and turned them over, staring at the the burning cracks roving indelibly across his palms, the light beneath still trying to break free.

"It happened in the Time War." It was the easiest way to explain it, and true enough; if the Doctor had not approached the schism to finally end the most destructive war across time ever seen, he would never have been drawn in too, and he wouldn't still be stuck with the consequences of his interference.

"Does it hurt?" Jack asked, the concern evident on his face.

Ianto nodded, but couldn't help but wince a smile as Jack picked up his gloves and tried to help him put them back on, taking such great care not to cause him any further pain. A surge of affection hit Ianto then, bowling in hard alongside the relief at having shared the truth finally, and he leaned forward and finally kissed Jack for the first time.

Though surprised, Jack didn't hesitate to respond, and Ianto was not surprised that it felt like they'd done this a million times before.

"I didn't exactly imagine this being the place where I finally got to kiss you," Jack said, with a bemused chuckle.

"Date's not over yet," Ianto whispered into his ear, making no secret of his meaning, nudging against him with his nose.

Jack didn't need any more incentive than that to move things along. They clearly needed to get out of the sewers though, so the Captain pulled up some coordinates on his own wristband, which was partially broken but still capable of storing information, and shared them with Ianto. Jack held onto him tightly as Ianto used his own wristband to transfer them both out directly.

The transportation beam landed right outside the front door of what turned out to be Ianto's flat, which Jack unlocked with a key from his pocket. The space inside was plain, but tidy enough, even though nothing about it stirred anything at all in Ianto. Just a plain, impersonal space that clearly he hadn't ever used all that much.

Since they had missed the movie part of date night, Jack pulled Ianto to the couch and decided to give him a crash course in 21st century television programming. But it didn't take long before interest was lost in favour of more kissing, and inevitably, clothes started being removed and discarded on the floor.

"I want to take you to bed," Jack told him between kisses, and the way he watched Ianto closely to gauge his reaction spoke volumes about how hard he was trying to hold himself in check. "We were always great together. Let me show you."

"I..." Ianto began, and paused, as he couldn't help but hate having to confess the truth. "I don't remember what we used to do. I haven't, uh-"

"Shh, leave it to me," Jack assured him, and that was where the night really started.

Once they were in the bedroom, Ianto discovered a lot of things in quick succession. He learned that Jack was wonderful and generous with his mouth, kissing him from head to toe like he was worshipping him, and then swallowing him down without any hestitation to take him to the edge of ecstasy, before throwing him over it without warning. And Ianto wanted to reciprocate, but hands weren't an option as the friction would hurt too much, and he really didn't know what to do otherwise. But Jack gently dissuaded him from worrying, encouraging some time spent just kissing and gently pressing flesh to flesh.

As soon as Ianto began to harden again, Jack pulled out a jar from his bedside table drawer with an obvious relish. He muttered against Ianto's mouth all the things he'd been craving, not holding back now that he was so close to getting what he wanted.

When he guided Ianto inside him, Jack's eyes slid closed like it was a wonderful relief, and sat back for a little while, grinning. All of the worries Ianto had about knowing what to do floated away the moment he began to move, and something more innate took hold. The rush of endorphins and a primal need had Ianto rolling Jack and pinning him down on the bed to give him exactly what he wanted, no politeness, no sugar-coating the raw need of it. Jack was as breathless as he was wildly joyful about it throughout, clinging on tightly and making absolutely no secret of how much he was enjoying himself.

After a certain point, Ianto pulled at his gloves with his teeth to throw them aside, the need to touch Jack with bare skin overwhelming him. No amount of pain could have stopped him at that point, and he reached down to take Jack in hand and take him over the edge. But he didn't stop there, without even thinking, all the fear lost in the heat of passion, he rewound time where his hand was spread out and pushed Jack through it again, and then again one more time as he too finally came to completion, timing the final one together. It left Jack panting in short sharp shocks and visibly trembling, his eyes huge with surprise.

"That... _that_ was new," Jack panted, and then laughed, a full hearty laugh that rumbled through the air.

Ianto carefully pulled back and tucked in against Jack's side, one hand drawn back against his collarbone, the other left resting on Jack's chest. His palms burned still, but it was more of a heated crawling feeling than the agony of fire breaking through from behind his skin. He was surprised to discover, when he moved the hand on Jack's chest, that there was some kind of energy still emanating. Curious, he raised his hand and it only brightened, glowing between them, like energy was passing between them.

It wasn't all coming from his side either; it looked like something emanating from Jack was reaching back, as though he had the same energy inside him and the strands were were coming together in proximity. Ianto thought that only he could see it until Jack's laughter died away too, both of them staring at the gold and white tendrils of light drifting between their skin until it slowly retreated on both sides.

"What _was_ that?" Ianto murmured, a strange exhaustion sweeping through him, heavier than he could remember ever feeling in his life.

Jack squeezed him tightly as he shook his head. "I don't know," he muttered. "Whatever you did there... that was something else. Are you hands still hurting?"

"Hmm," Ianto breathed, hardly hearing him, his mind tipping him over into a deep sleep already.

He vaguely felt Jack pull away, and heard the bedside table drawer slide out. Jack cleaned them both off with something wet and then the covers were pulled up, cocooning them both into warmth.

Ianto awoke with a start, and all he could see was the cube and the plinth. It look a long moment to blink the vision of it away and to breathe, but the room he was in was dark and too big. It looked endless. His hands were burning and he had to bite his lip against the onslaught of sensation in his palms.

There was just enough light in the room still to see his gloves, left on the bedside table, and he grabbed them to put them on. The fire calmed a little then and it helped him to overcome the way his mind was trying to trick him. He had no idea how long he'd slept, or what time it might be, but it was still very dark and quiet, so he didn't think it could have been long. It was the first time he'd slept in a bed since he could even remember and the softness of it was unfamiliar.

In his half waking state, he took one of the covers with him as he slid off the bed and went down to the floor. He rolled underneath, needing to be somewhere he could see the boundaries of the space around him again, with a hard surface to lie on. Immediately he calmed and the peace that had swept over him before, lulling him towards a deep rest, returned like the echo of a lullaby. He was out again in moments.

Ianto drifted awake again when daylight began to appear at the edges of the curtains, dawn breaking over the city. He was surprised to discover that he was not alone; Jack had joined him underneath the bed, lying beside him with his head turned aside, watching him.

The Captain smiled as he slowly woke up, and Ianto couldn't help but return it, languidly.

"I want to tell you something," Jack said, almost at a whisper, like he'd been contemplating it for hours, and then the smile was waning, his eyes growing faraway. "I went away for a while, right before you were taken. Two months for you, but it lasted a whole year for me. The world was taken to the brink of destruction in that year, full on alien invasion, the works." Jack slid his hand into Ianto's, not minding the glove, just wanting to find a connection. "The man responsible captured me... held me prisoner, kept me as his personal plaything, and although time was reversed and that year never happened, I can't forget any of it. A lot has happened to me in my life but _that_... that might have been the worst. I can't get it out of my head."

"I'm sorry," he sighed, sadly. Ianto had promised to tell him what happened, and in the peace of morning, no world beyond the compact space underneath the bed that they were sharing, something unlocked. "After John and Gray disappeared and I was left behind, I went through a portal to an alien world. There was some sort of catastrophe and a lot of people died, I think. It's blurry, and I don't know if it was my fault but, regardless, they blamed me for it. Their punishment was imprisonment in an empty room, my body frozen in time but my mind still left as normal. The only thing provided-" He had to pause to take in a deep breath, "Was a way to relive a memory, and then lose it. A trade. I tried to hang on, to save the most important memories, but... it was endless. Years. Centuries. I lost my mind a thousand times and all there was, was nothing. When at last I was freed, just about everything was gone."

"But you remembered me."

"It was the one thing that I couldn't give away. I knew it was important - _find home, find Jack, stop Gray._ But by then I couldn't even remember where home was. I was... I don't know. Empty I guess. After that I travelled around for a while with the Doctor-"

"The Doctor?" Jack gaped at that revelation.

"He's the one who pulled me out of there. And he helped me. A lot." Ianto pointed to the x-shaped scar on his temple. "We found a way to restore some of my memories, a sort of alien creature that attaches to skin, but it took some time for it to work. I was getting somewhere but then the Time War in the Kasterborous constellation spilled out and the Doctor had no choice but to get involved. I interfered where I shouldn't have and touched something... I don't even really understand what it was. But after it happened, the Doctor didn't want to know me anymore."

Jack shook his head, and muttered under his breath, "Sounds familiar."

"My hands... they've been burning ever since. Next, I ran into the Time Agency and, well, I gave them your brother's name because Captain John had planned to take Gray there and train him up, so he was expected."

"Wait, John told me the Agency was shut down."

"I suppose he wanted to surprise you. John intended to rescue Gray and then get him into the club because he thought it would lead to you returning to them... to _him_ , I guess. So I pretended to be Gray so they would give me a chance. John really wants you back, doesn't he?"

"He never could let anything go," Jack sighed.

"Well, the long and short of it is, I put everything I had into getting in. There was an Agent there who helped me a lot, Agent Six." He paused to see if Jack would react, and could tell from his responding smile that he knew her. "Soon as I could, I took a leaf out of Captain John's book to get agreement on this mission." He turned his head aside in a fast snap. "I'm here to bring you back into the fold Agent Seven," he said, with a mock overdone formality. "So that's it, that's what happened... why I can't remember. Every time I wake up, I think I'm back in the room. It's never really gone."

Jack squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry that happened to you."

"I wish I remembered more of who I was, but it's like looking at someone else's photo album. Just pictures, and a bunch of gaps. That's why I... Look, I need you to know that this changes nothing. I like my work. I like being part of the Time Agency. It takes me all over the universe and, for whatever reason, I have a way to help set things right. I can help people. I have a duty to go back."

He knew it wasn't exactly what Jack wanted to hear, from the way he went silent, and Ianto could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind.

"What are you thinking?" he asked, finally.

"Just thinking about all the ways I can persuade you to stay. Last night was only a preview, you know. There's so much I want to do to you... you have no idea."

"Jack-"

"I won't stop you, I already said that." Jack seemed determined not to let it bother him, grinning that irrepressible grin. "I'm not going to make it easy though. In fact, I'm going to make it _really_ hard."

_"_ Promise?" Ianto replied, with an eyebrow waggle.

That was all Jack needed to practically drag him out and get him back on top of the bed, very eager to get started.

*

Another month passed by before the moment that Ianto had been waiting for - _preparing_ for - finally came.

The team was called to an abandoned building on the outskirts of the city with four strange alien signals inside. As Gwen was running late, it had just been Jack, Tosh, Owen and him. They expected to be confronting a new species, based on the readings, but it was a trick. Four bombs had been placed, strategically set apart to encourage them to split up.

With only seconds left on the counter of the bomb he'd walked into, Ianto had acted on instinct, stopping the timer with his hand and reversing that whole part of the unit, as fast as he could. But he was thrown back from it before he was done as another blast rang out nearby.

The entire building shook as the ceiling partially caved in, sending brick and concrete down in a cascade. Only the corner that he had been in was preserved untouched, aside from the fallout from elsewhere and the dust thrown.

"Jack? Owen? Tosh? Can anyone hear me?" he asked into his comms, but there was nothing.

Heart pounding, he turned about and ran directly across to the other side of the building, to the area Jack had been in. If he had been thinking straight, he might have run for Owen first as he was nearer, but there was no thought, only fear.

Ianto found Jack half submerged in front of a fallen girder, a trickle of blood running in a red line from the corner of his mouth to his neck. He climbed up over the rubble, throwing any debris blocking his path aside. Once close enough, he removed a glove to press his fingers to Jack's neck and feel for a heartbeat, expecting to feel it. There was nothing. "No no no," he gasped, and he frantically started trying to move some of the heavy bricks away from the Captain's body, hoping to figure out what injury had caused his death, to see if he could somehow undo it and bring him back, though he honestly didn't know if he could.

He had the shock of his life as Jack suddenly gasped in, like a man breaking above the waves, desperate for air, his whole body shuddering as his arms flailed out.

"Aaaah! Oh my god!" Ianto cried out. "Jack! You... you were dead... you were _dead-_ "

"Me? You know I can't die," Jack laughed, grimly, and then a puzzled expression came over his face. "Wait, you... you didn't know did you?"

Ianto shook his head, dumbfounded, staring at him like he'd grown a second head. "Can't die?"

"I'll explain later, but for now, help me out."

"R-right." He pushed aside some more bits of concrete until he was about to wrench Jack free.

As soon as he was out of danger, Jack doubled over and coughed out some of the dust he'd inhaled. "You look for Owen. I'll find Toshiko."

Ianto had to fall back onto his mental stress training to push what he'd just witnessed down and focus on the task at hand. He put his glove back onto a shaking hand, turned about, and then ran back the way he came.

"Owen!" he shouted. "Owen, can you hear me?"

"Over here," came a weak voice, and Ianto span around and followed it over to the corner. "My comms are busted."

His colleague was pinned under the bricks right beneath a pane of windowglass that was hanging over him like a sword of damocles. It was obvious that he was in serious danger; if it shifted, it had a good chance of cutting him in half.

Fortunately he was easy to get to, only really pinned down on one side, with the bricks light enough for a serious injury to be unlikely. So Ianto grabbed onto his free arm and literally slid him out of danger. Then he helped him up.

"Are the others okay?"

"Jack died," Ianto said, wide eyed, "And he came back."

"That _is_ his thing." The way he said it, Owen made it sound ridiculous that he was even mentioning it. "Did you find Tosh?"

His nonchalance about Jack left Ianto speechless for a moment, and Owen took that as a no. He took off running and, after a moment spent snapping himself out of it, Ianto followed on behind, catching up easily as he was the faster runner.

"Over here!" they heard Jack call, and both men changed direction to find him.

Toshiko was pinned under a huge steel girder, her frightened voice echoing as she shouted that it was coming down even more.

"It's okay Tosh, we'll get you out of here in just a second," Jack promised as they arrived. "Help me with this." His hands sought purchase on the underside of the girder, and once Owen and Ianto were in place, he braced himself. "Oh three. One... two... three!" Together the three men lifted it up and shuffled forward, taking it far enough away to uncover Toshiko.

"Are you okay?" Jack moved in to try and help her up.

"My ribs hurt. My arm too," she gasped, the pain evident in her voice.

Owen was there in seconds, carefully checking her arm. She cried out as he tested it. "Yep, that's broken. Ianto? Can you-?"

"Where's the break?"

"Lower radius."

"Got it." As the Doctor shuffled away to make space, Ianto kneeled down beside her and gave her the best smile he could, aware that it was probably wan at best. "Tosh, you're going to be okay. I just need you to... not freak out. Alright?"

Ianto removed his gloves and held his hands over her broken arm, seeking out the break in his mind and concentrating on bringing the light forward, rewinding just that specific bone into the version that had existed a few minutes before the bomb went off, before the injury ever happened. When that was done, he moved his hands to hover over her ribcage, returning as much of the area as he could to a pre-bruised state as well.

His eyes fluttered open though and he saw the shocked expression on her face very briefly before his punishment came, and he threw his head back and grimaced against the burning pain in his hands, curling them in to his chest.

Though he registered Jack's hand on his shoulder, and his voice asking a question, he was too dazed to respond, fumbling to get his gloves back on, to regain his control which had come perilously close to being lost. He was using it too much, all at once, and he knew it.

"Hey," Jack tried again, his other hand going to Ianto's chest as he tried to steady him. "You okay?"

"There's one more bomb," Ianto said, pulling away, blinking away the tears of pain that were still threatening to overspill. "I reversed its timer but I don't know how long for. I can go try and stop it permanently-"

"Too risky." Jack held him back, stopping him from going. "Leave it to blow. We're getting out of here."

"This tech looks advanced. Maybe from the future. We have a better chance of figuring out who did this if we have one in tact," he pushed back, ducking out of Jack's grip. "You guys get out - I'll figure a way to deactivate it."

He ran back towards the corner of the building that was still in tact, seeking out the bomb. There were still a few minutes on the timer but it was too close for comfort, so Ianto kneeled down by it, took off his gloves yet again and forced himself to attack the timer mechanism and take it back. In doing this, he realised it had to have been remotely triggered, either by a sensor or a person, as the timer wasn't capable of going past a ten minute lead up. So whoever triggered the bombs was nearby; probably watching.

It hurt again, as it always did, but there he refused to surrender to the pain. Ianto scanned the bomb with his wristband, trying to get some feel for its materials and any unusual readings that might give some clues. Ianto had some suspicions, but nothing to back up his feeling that this might be part of Grays plan, just based on the visual of it.

His suspicions were partially confirmed when he caught some frequencies around the casing which indicated that it had passed through time at some point.

He realised as he probed the device that there was some sort of second internal timer that wasn't connected to the main one. It had to be a backup, there to ensure it still went off if the main trigger failed. It was impossible to know how close it was to kicking off its own secondary charges that would detonate the rest, so he immediately kneeled down and placed his hands over the bomb more widely, reaching again, the cracks in his hands rupturing with the molten energy, seeking purchase on the interior circuits this time.

It was impossible to see what he needed to do, being no expert on the systems of its construction, so he had to push, harder than he ever had before, forcing time to wind backwards in a wider net, shifting as much of the internal parts of the bomb as he could to a point where the pieces were either melting or turning into dust. It was far further than he'd ever pushed anything before and, like an elastic band being stretched, the further he went, the harder it was. And when the backlash from it came, it hit him hard, like being punched in the face. Ianto lost all cohesion in his mind, falling backwards into the yawning mouth of the schism. The fire erupted from his hands with such ferocity that his mind ran from it and everything whited out.

And suddenly Ianto was back in the cube, looking out at the green-coated figure standing against the lit up wall... at his saviour.

Only this time, the image cleared away, like clouds parting, and he discovered that it was not who he expected. It was not the Doctor. It was only a reflection of himself; the Time Agent, in his black gloves and green coat. He turned in a circle and saw that there were other figures becoming visible through the backlit white walls. Behind him was the Prisoner in his white overalls. To one side, the Companion in his brown shirt and bracers, and suit trousers. To the other, the Trainee, in his green uniform with the Time Agency insignia emblazoned on it. Below his feet, he saw an infinity of black chaos thrashing about, and above was the schism, all of time twisting within. He was standing where the plinth should have been, unable to look away from what was above him as the walls began closing in.

A voice echoed into the space. Someone calling his name. After a moment, he realised that he knew who it was. "Jack?" he gasped, spinning around, searching for him.

"Ianto! Come back to me!" the voice echoed again and he wanted to, he really wanted to, but he couldn't see him. Everything was closing in and he didn't know what was going to happen.

Suddenly, the light crashed down like a waterfall, but for once, it didn't hurt him. The next thing he knew he was lost in an embrace, warm lips on his, kissing him. He curled towards the sudden peace radiating through him, feeling completely safe and held.

The lips drew back and he saw Jack, smiling, so very handsome, captured in the flare of light around them. And every version of Ianto was there at once somehow, forward in his mind, all falling in love in that one moment, before snapping back into their own times. He sagged against Jack gratefully and then pulled him closer by the lapels, desperate to recapture that feeling, kissing him again.

"Alright, lovebirds, can we move this along a bit," came Owen's intruding voice.

Ianto pulled back, only belatedly realising that they had an audience.

He was surprised to find not only Owen and Tosh, but Gwen and Rhys there as there, all standing awkwardly in a semicircle around them.

"You okay?" Jack asked, gently, into his hair.

"Peachy." Ianto allowed Jack to help him onto his feet, doing his best to appear less shaky than he was. His gloves were handed to him and he put them back on, gratefully. "There's a frequency around the bomb casing that indicates they've been brought thorugh time some point," he told them. "The best explanation is that it's-"

Jack started as his wristband beeped, and with a quick tap, a blue holo projection appeared ahead of them all.

"Captain John," Ianto finished his sentence, as the man himself appeared before them in holo-message form.

"Ooo, deja vu. Or did I say that already? Hey, team. Of course, there might be a few less of you by now." The man smiled in Jack's vague direction. "Don't know if you liked my little gift. Of course, you can't die. And with all that life, all that time, you can't spare any for me." Jack glowered at the recording at that. "Oh. Say hi to the family."

The projection turned aside, projecting an image of its own, and Gray appeared next to him, his hands in manacles.

"Gray," Ianto growled, stepping forward, protectively.

"Been a while since you've seen your brother, eh, Jack," Captain John's recording continued. "Okay, here's what's going to happen. Everything you love, everything you treasure will die. I'm going to tear your world apart, Captain Jack Harkness, piece by piece. Starting now. Maybe now you'll want to spend some time with me."

The image was gone, and they all stared at the empty space for a moment in shock.

"This is it," Ianto said, stepping forward. "Gray is pretending to be held hostage to try and get to you."

"What's going on Ianto?" Gwen asked, rattled, and he realised belatedly that she had been on her honeymoon when he'd explained more fully why he was there to the others. "You knew this was coming?" she asked.

"It's why I came back. Captain John has a small detonation device in his stomach and some sort of monitoring device attached to his wristband. I presume it's so Gray can make sure he's doing what he's told. That message was fake." He checked his wristband. "I'm getting a reading on his signal. Oh he's... nearby." He ran to the window to see out. "Damn, he's taking the SUV."

Tosh pulled out her portable monitoring device, which was beeping. "I'm getting readings of Rift activity all over the city," she said, urgently. "Major rift flares at St Helen's Hospital, the Police Headquarters and the Central IT Server Station."

"Right, then he's taking the car to slow our response," Jack growled. "The Rift flares means he wants us to split us up."

"He doesn't know that I'm here," Ianto reminded Jack. "He doesn't know we knew he was coming. We can use that to our advantage." Ianto stepped closer to Jack, the urge to protect him overwhelming.

Gwen's phone was the next thing to ring, and she pulled it out, standing to one side. "Hey, Andy?" she said, and paused, someone on the end sounding quite frantic. "Okay, I'm on my way, all right?"

"Rhys, drop Owen at the hospital. Tosh, cover the Central Server building. Gwen, the police station." Jack turned to Ianto. "We'll go back to the Hub and prepare a proper welcome."

Owen, Tosh, Gwen and Rhys all exchanged glances, then set off in a run to get out of the building.

"It's finally here," Ianto muttered, to himself, surprised by how nervous he suddenly felt. "The moment I've been dreading."

"It'll be fine," Jack assured him. "He's locked out of the systems. There's nothing he can do. We're going to figure this out."

"He could kill you. Transport you away somewhere. He has a lot of options if you let him get close," Ianto pointed out. "Though I suppose the death thing isn't a problem."

"I'm sorry, I really thought you knew." Jack rested a hand in the small of his back, almost as if he was trying to apologise through touch. "It happened a long time ago. I've died a lot of times. It never sticks."

"At least now it makes sense as to why burying you alive was Gray's goal." He shook his head with disbelief as the very last piece of the puzzle finally fell into place.

"Hey," Jack said, cupping his face with his hand. "I'm not going anywhere. We'll take care of this together."

Ianto looked at Jack sadly. He wrapped his arms around him in a hug, kissed him on the cheek, and then whispered into his ear. "I'm sorry."

He felt Jack recoil with surprise as the needle went into his neck and Ianto pumped the syringe empty. The way he yanked away, and the look of hurt on his face was hard to see.

"Found your stash," Ianto told him, and he helped Jack down to the ground gently. He then pulled him into his arms and activated his wristband to the coordinates he had pre-stored there, ready for this very eventuality.

*

As soon as his wristband indicated that Captain John was in place and the Hub system had locked down on him, Ianto rolled quietly out of his crawlspace near the pterodactyl's nest and deftly shot him in the throat with his pistol, dropping his fellow Agent immediately down to the deck with a heavy thud.

Ianto calmly walked across to him. Captain John looked up with wide eyes, blood gurgling out of this neck and mouth. "Surprise," he said, enjoying the moment of victory. "I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me."

Wordlessly, Ianto kneeled down and put one hand over the wristband that was welded to his John's skin, concentrating on the monitoring device that Gray had placed there. At the same time, he aimed his gun directly at John's face... and shot a bullet.

Captain John recoiled as he did, but the only thing that was destroyed was the device, the bullet embedding into the metal deck a few inches from his head. Ianto then holstered his gun again and then put his hands over the bullet wound in John's neck, reversing the damage he had done. He grimaced as he did, the pain as hot and searing as ever, and then he fell back once completed, panting for breath, hands curled up.

"What the hell?" John gasped and sat up, frantically pressing where the wound had been with his hand.

"He'll think you're dead... if he's got visuals, it will look like I just shot you in the face. I shorted the monitoring system at the same time."

"Wait, I'm not bleeding."

"You're fine, but we need to get that bomb out of you next. Can you take some pain?" Ianto checked, but didn't wait for an answer. He pushed him down again and lifted up his shirt, feeling the skin to find it.

"Well, Eye Candy, you should have said-"

"Shut up." Ianto took out his pocket knife and, without even pausing to let him brace himself, sliced open a hole in his stomach. He yanked the slender oblong device out hard, and then reversed time on the cut flesh. As it only needed to go about ten seconds back, it was the easiest wind of time he'd attempted.

Then Ianto held the miniature bomb in his hand and concentrated on winding it back as far as he could, turning all of the wires and components to inert dust.

"Whoa," he heard John mutter. "Well ain't that interesting."

Ianto wanted to put on a brave front, but he couldn't quite help but cry out a little at the effort, the fire lashing out of his skin again, the in his flesh cracks feeling like they were being painfully open.

"Where's Jack?" Captain John asked, eyes narrowed.

"Safe. Better question, where's Gray?"

"He's programmed the coordinates into my wristband. I don't know where... or _when_. I was supposed to distract Jack's little team and then grab him and take him on a little joyride."

"Hence opening up Rifts around the city."

"Obviously, though the system locked down halfway through so only a couple worked. There are more bombs too, fifteen, planted at major landmarks. He wanted me to set them off. As if I'd want to blow up this stupid city, when I could be experiencing seventeen simultaneous pleasures in the Lotus Nebula." Captain John suddenly cocked his head, staring at Ianto with an expression akin to surprise. "I enjoyed your macho little promises to stop him, back there at the Bedlam Outpost. It was kind of sexy. I could see why Jack was into that. But I have to admit, I genuinely didn't think you could do it, Eye Candy. Aren't you just full of surprises."

"You have no idea," he replied. "Now then, let's go see Gray."

"What? Why?" John huffed. "If he thinks I'm dead. He must know it's over. Screw that guy."

"It's not over." With a deep, exasperated breath, he grabbed onto Captain John's wrist again, looking at the mess of melted flesh and wristband. "Hold still." Ianto concentrated, pressing the light forward, first into the skin, restoring it to a time before the injury had occurred, and then again along the rims of the leather parts of the wristband itself to repair it. When he was done, he grabbed his gloves and pulled them on, both hands shaking.

Captain John looked suitably impressed. "That's some trick," he said, inspecting the damage. "Wait, so you really shot me in the neck? And then, what, healed me all back up again?"

"Not quite. Look that isn't important right now. What is important is that I have a plan. I'm going to need you to help me get close to Gray."

"How close?"

Ianto moved in close to him, giving the impression of a demonstration of just how close, but then he grabbed hold of him and swiped his wristband to activate it.

"Oh not again Eye Candy-" were the last words Captain John said before the transport beam took them both away.

*

> _Dear Jack,_
> 
> _If you're reading this, I'm gone, and so is Captain John. I'm sorry I locked you up in the vault in the archives, even if it was only on a timer. It was the only way I could be absolutely sure that you'd be safe from him._
> 
> _I don't want you to think the worst though, so that's why I've left this note on your desk for you to find._
> 
> _Two months from today, around midday, head to the steps over at the side of the bay. If everything has gone according to plan, that's when you'll know._
> 
> _In case it doesn't work out, I hope you know that I love you._
> 
> _Ianto_
> 
> _PS - Captain John planted fifteen more of those bombs at major landmarks. I've already given the Torchwood systems the ability to track time fluctuated frequencies within the hub, so Tosh should be able to use the mods to cast a wider net, but you'll need to move fast._ _Go team._


	8. The Captain

On the steps of the Plass overlooking Cardiff bay, Agent Eight sat for a while, looking out at the ocean beyond. It was peaceful there, the waters a deep dark grey colour, the wind just on the right side of soothing, the air salty to the taste.

Every now and then he checked behind him to see if the man he was waiting for had arrived, but there was no one on the Plass but tourists with their primitive old cameras. Later, he saw groups of people in suits and smart clothes leaving their offices to pick up some lunch as well, but still, the specific person he was waiting for was absent.

Then, a little after noon, the Agent finally saw a man in a blue-grey military coat approaching from the other side.

It was definitely him; the man from the database photo he'd been shown. Agent Seven. Javic Thane. Historical field name, Captain Jack Harkness.

_His brother._

With a deep breath, the young Agent stood up and turned around. He could tell that his brother recognised him, his face falling, his step slowing.

"Javic," Gray said, by way of nervous greeting. "Sorry, it's _Jack_ now isn't it? I should probably call you Captain actually. I uh, I do still go by Gray though, if that helps."

"Gray," Jack breathed, shaking his head with disbelief.

"It's me." He smiled, nervously, fidgeting his hands, not quite sure where to put them. "It's... wow, it's so strange to see you after all this time. The only memory I have of you is as a kid. You used to spin me around by the arms and we'd run along the sand dunes a lot. It was really bright there." Gray swallowed hard and his gaze fell downwards to his feet. "Um, don't worry, I'm not here to do anything to you. I'm not, well... _messed up_ , anymore."

"I don't understand."

"Maybe it's best if we sit down," Gray offered, and made himself comfortable on the concrete steps, inviting his brother to join him with a nervous wave of his hand. "It's kind of a long story. I'd like to explain."

There was an understandable level of hesitation, but after moment or two of thought, his brother joined him on the steps and sat down.

"So, here's what happened..." Gray began.

*

"It's over, Gray," Ianto shouted.

He had no idea where they were exactly but he was actually relieved that there was no one around. No civilians to worry about. Just an empty field and a good amount of clear open space, which would actually make it harder for Gray to escape.

The young man was still in his dirty brown rags, with a familiar pinstripe suit jacket worn over the top of them, which Ianto hadn't seen for two centuries. He stood his ground defiantly, glaring as both Ianto and Captain John stormed across the field towards him.

"I don't want to hurt you, but I will if I have to," Ianto told him, making his seriousness on that very plain. "I know you've suffered. I know that what the Bane did to you was beyond what most people even have the capacity to survive. I truly am sorry for everything that happened. I get it. I do."

"Oh you get it?" Gray spat. "Those creatures, they live to torture. They kept us just on the verge of life. I'd lie there, hemmed in by corpses, praying to become one. All because he let go of my hand."

"It's not his fault. But even if it was, what does any of this change? Nothing. So I have an offer for you. I can take it all away. All the memories of what they did. I can restore you to who you were meant to be."

Gray cocked an eyebrow at that, but he didn't say anything, which Ianto took as a sign of tentative progress.

"Tell him what you were planning before, John," Ianto said aside.

"Huh?"

"The Time Agency," he clarified, through gritted teeth.

"Oh right. Yeah that. Well. Right." Captain John turned to Gray, not really making any secret of the fact that he didn't really want to be there. "There's a place for you, in the future, with the Time Agency. Lots of adventures, a chance to travel the universe. Great dental plan. You can try out a superb range of pleasure planets - happy to share a list. With that face, you're gonna have the time of your life."

Ianto was watching Gray closely, and he thought he could see some signs of progress when the young man's stern, tormented expression faltered ever so slightly. "I can rewind things, take the memories of what they did away," Ianto said again, more softly. "You don't have to live with this pain, Gray."

"You can really do that?" Gray asked, finally walking towards him.

"Yes. I can reverse your mind to before you were taken, and then fast forward it back to who you are now, but it'll be without any of the bad things having happened. No memories made. A chance to start again."

Ianto held his breath, wondering which way Gray would go. Could he accept that? Could he put his revenge aside?

"I... I do want that," Gray told him, finally.

"You just need to let me come closer, okay?"

Head hanging, his eyes distant, Gray nodded his agreement.

Ianto and Captain John exchanged glances, and then Ianto slowly moved forward to close the gap between himself and Gray. As he walked, he removed his gloves and put them into his pocket in preparation. John hung back, watching the scene with a slightly worried frown.

Finally, when Ianto and Gray were close enough to touch, their eyes locked, and Ianto knew exactly what was coming from the way that cold, dead gaze revealed itself again. He was not surprised. In fact, this was exactly what he had been expecting. He was no fool; he knew there was no coming back from what Gray had become.

All he'd needed was to get close...

The knife which plunged into his gut was considerably larger than he had hoped it would be, but Ianto still managed to swing his arm around and get the syringe into Gray's throat, delivering exactly the same sedative he'd given to Jack, with almost exactly the same move.

Ianto fell back and hit the ground with a cry of pain, the knife left sticking out of his gut. He stared up at Gray, watching as he pulled out the empty syringe and threw it aside with disgust.

"Do you really think I'd let my brother off that easily? Pretend it never happened? No, he needs to suffer. He needs to-" Gray began staggering, fighting it, not quite succeeding. "This isn't over," he promised, as he finally slid down to his knees. "I will kill both of you for this, in ways you can't imagine. I will... I will..." At last, he slumped and fell unconscious.

"A little help?" Ianto pleaded to John, unable to budge the weapon that had been embedded right the way through his body. He screamed as John simply yanked it out without so much as a countdown, so loud that a number of birds suddenly launched out of the trees on the other side of the field.

First things first, Ianto immediately held his hands over his knife wound, reversing the injury and repairing his clothes at once using his time manipulation skills yet again. Once that was done, he just took a moment, lying back on the grass, a heavy sigh of relief overcoming him at having managed to get this far.

"Seriously handy thing you have there," Captain John commented.

"I hope the Time Agency agrees. When we get there, it might be the only thing that stops them from putting me in the freezer." Ianto crawled over to Gray and looked over him for a moment, marvelling at how innocent and young now that he was unconscious. "He'll thank me for this later, I hope."

"Doubtful, Eye Candy. The kid's clearly messed up. But, you do what you like. I'm getting out of-"

"Wait," Ianto pleaded, stopping him in his tracks. "Can you just hold on a minute? It's just... this might not work," he told him, needing him to understand. It was one thing to wind someone's brain back all the way to childhood, but then he was going to have to disengage for a second and then wind the childhood brain forward to adulthood, to ensure that he suffered no adverse effects. Ianto just knew that it was going to cause a supernova of pain doing it, probably worse than he'd felt even when bringing Owen back to life, and there was a chance he would fail, no matter his good intentions. He knew he had to make sure that John was prepared for that.

This was for Jack, he remembered, because saving Jack physically was one thing, but this would save him in other ways too. If he saved Gray first, then Jack might finally forgive himself for what happened. That meant he was going try, no matter how hard it would be.

"If I zone out, I might get stuck that way." Ianto almost had before, with the bomb in the abandoned building, and this time there was no Jack to pull him out of it. "Look, if that happens, I need you to promise me you'll look after Gray if I can't. Help him. Take him to the Time Agency and- and stay with him. Help him through the training-"

"Stay there for like a whole year, are you kidding? Those people are the worst."

"Bringing him there was _your_ idea," Ianto snapped, exasperated. "It doesn't have to be the whole time, just take him there now and then return when you can and mentor him or something. Make sure he's okay. Do something useful for once in your life. You said you wanted Jack to be grateful. Well, that's how he'll be grateful."

That seemed to be the right thing to have said, as Ianto could see renewed interest in Captain John's eyes at the suggestion.

"If I can't, when Gray's ready for it, take him back to Jack, two months to the day after we left. Leave him on the steps of the Plass near the bay around midday. I left Jack a note, telling him to find him there. I just need you to promise that you'll do that?"

John nodded solemnly, and for once, Ianto believed he wasn't lying.

"Alright then. Here goes." Ianto settled himself with Gray's head in his lap, and he closed his eyes. He thought of Jack, his face in the glowing light above him, how much he wanted to see him happily reunited with his family. Then he took a deep breath, and began.

*

"I was pretty out of it when I got to the base. I barely knew a thing about anything," Gray shared, "I picked it up fast but I did take a little longer than some of the other Time Agency recruits. Needed some special tutelage. We were genetically enhanced at a young age though, right? So that gave me a good advantage. And the Captain stayed with me throughout, giving me extra training, forcing me to complete assignments I wasn't too big of a fan of." He smiled fondly at the memories. "It's been a ride but here I am. I graduated around six months ago, my time." Gray held up his wristband as proof.

Jack stared at him, tears welling up in his eyes as the reality of his being there, perfectly well, finally hit home. "Gray," he gasped, and then pulled his brother into a hug. "I'm so sorry... what happened to you before was my fault. I looked for you. I searched for you for years. You were my first thought every day."

"You don't have to feel guilty," his brother assured him, hugging Jack back. "I don't even remember anything about that. I only know what I've been told. And... I know it was an accident. It was a warzone, it could have happened to anyone. I know that I came back and tried to hurt you, so I wanted to tell you in person that I'm sorry for that. I promise you, I'm fine now. Better than fine, actually."

The brothers slowly parted, and Jack stared at him, his eyes still welling up. "I am so proud of you," he said, finally daring to believe that it was real, that his little brother really had been saved. "All I ever wanted was for you to be happy."

"I am. I really am. I've had some great adventures already. Agent Five's already shown me around a few spots around the galaxy that, let's just say, I have made some very good _friends_ in," he said, with a laugh and a waggle of his eyebrows. "I do want to know, is it true you put a squid brothel out of business on Rigel Prime?"

Jack barked out a laugh of surprise. "Don't believe everything John tells you," he said, paused, and then added, "But let's just say, I do have a lifetime ban from that entire region." He was joking of course, but he let Gray believe it for a few moments at least.

"I have a lot to live up to," Gray chuckled. "I'm definitely going to give it my best shot." He grinned and slapped his brother on the back.

"Oh is that how it is?"

"You better believe it."

Jack stared at him, smiling, amazed by their easy camaraderie. "So, where's Ianto?" he asked, hopefully. "Is here somewhere too?"

There was a slightly hesitance in Gray's expression that put him on edge. "You'll have to ask the Captain about that," Gray told him.

"What does that mean? Is he okay? What happened? Did John do something to him?"

Gray drew that deep breath people draw in when they have a story to tell, before launching into the rest.

*

At least for this hearing, Ianto wasn't strapped up and he could actually understand what was being said, unlike the trial he'd had on the Ferosian planet. That was progress, Ianto thought, as he stood up to answer to the charges brought.

This was it. The decision on whether he would be frozen and stored away like a meat slab had probably already been made, he knew. The hearing was only really a formality, afforded to Agents who were officiated; his one last chance to make an argument for leniency. But it really was the only chance he had to say his peace, so he knew he had to make the most of it.

Some of the other Agents had been permitted in as witnesses and were sitting at the back of the room, watching in silence. Captain John was long buggered off of course, but Agent Six and her wife Agent Ten were both there, as was almost all of the Agents he had trained with, including, unexpectedly, a pensive-looking Agent Twenty Four.

Really this was a decision for Command alone though, and from his past experience of testing the waters on telling the truth to Agent One, Ianto didn't hold out much hope that he was going to forgive him his transgressions. This had all happened on his watch, and he'd been brand new to the role of being in charge, so Ianto had a strong suspicion that he felt like he'd been made a fool out of. That didn't stand Ianto in good stead for getting out of the situation easily.

There was a click of the entrance door closing and Ianto turned around to the sound. He was surprised to see that Gray had entered the room as well.

It had taken quite a while for him to snap out of that mental recreation of the cube that his mind retreated into, the white hot pain of helping Gray completely overwhelming him, as he'd expected it might. He'd been surprised to wake up in the Time Agency infirmary though, courtesy of Captain John, who'd unexpectedly come through for him by not leaving him behind this time.

Soon after waking, he had been told by Agent Six that, in the weeks it took for him to snap out of it, the real Gray Thane had been permitted to become part of the next cohort of trainees.

He hadn't actually seen Gray himself since waking up though, so the sight of him there, his hair cut, his face clean, his rags replaced by the green uniform of a trainee, was very strange to him. Agent Six had assured him that Gray's psychological examinations had shown no serious issues, but Ianto had still worried that it hadn't worked; that he was too damaged to be saved and it was all a trick.

But no, there he was, looking like a completely normal young man. The Gray Thane that should have been. He smiled tentatively at him, and was quietly surprised when it was returned.

Ianto turned around to face Agent One with more determination than ever to find a way out of this, after seeing Gray there. He really wanted to be able to help Jack's little brother through his training, to have the chance to take him back to see Jack at the end... _to see Jack again..._

He hoped, rather than knew, that Captain John had put in a good word for him before he left. He also thought that Agent Six might have too, though of course there was a limit to what she could say to avoid being implicated in the deception, since she had known he was an imposter long before he'd ever confessed to it. Beyond that, Ianto was all on his own on this.

"I have no defence," he said, surprising those watching the hearing. "If desperation was a defence, I'd try it, but I know it's not. I did not come here with a purpose, but I did find a purpose here. Everything past the name I gave you at the start was done on my own merit. My record of service is clean, which is more than you can say for some in your ranks. So if I'm not good enough for you, after everything I've done, then I have no defence. What I can do is at least show you that I have valuable skills that you need."

His gloves fell to the floor and he poured the light forward to rewind time on the futuristic set of manacles placed around his wrists to secure him there, returning the locks to an open state. He then took the edge of one of the opened manacles, raised his arm and scratched a wound across it as hard as he could. The blood rolled down his arm as he dropped them to the ground, and then he completed his demonstration by reversing time across his skin to erase the wound.

"That's enough," Agent One said, and stood up amidst a collective holding of breath. "I have been made fully aware of your particular skills at time manipulation."

"Then you know that I can be of help. Please... I belong here."

"Mr Jones, what I know is that you have been hiding a great deal from us. This is very concerning. We have detected time fissures at various points within the base which, with further investigation, we can say with some certainty were caused by you. By this ability of yours."

Ianto sagged a little. That wasn't what wanted to hear.

"At this point in time - and it gives me no pleasure to say this - you _are_ dangerous. What you can do _is_ dangerous. But I'm prepared to give you a chance, if you will tell me the precise circumstances of how this happened, here, on record."

His heart sunk. That wasn't something he could share, because it wasn't his story to tell; this was just an echo of a moment that belonged to the Doctor. To explain would mean sharing what he knew of the Time Lords and the Untempered Schism, and he felt strongly that it was no one else's business to hear what the Doctor had had to do to end the Time War and save the universe. Least of all the Time Agency, no matter how well meaning their general aims.

"Well then," Agent One said, in response to his silence. "Your title of Agent is hereby officially revoked. The designation of Eight is also released to its originally intended recipient. And I have no choice but to place you on ice, temporarily, until such time as we are able to determine the implications of your condition. This is for the safety of everyone here."

This caused some chatter to erupt at the back of the room.

"He's not dangerous," someone shouted out. "He saved my life."

Ianto turned around and was very surprised to see Agent Twenty Four standing up, looking surprisingly determined.

"When I got injured during a track course, and no one else was around to help me, he stopped me from bleeding to death. He healed my injury... repaired my uniform too. It isn't dangerous. It's a gift... How can you not see that?"

"Son, you had a chance to input prior to the hearing," Agent One said, glowering at him. "Your argument has been made."

"I made an argument as well," Agent Six said, standing up next. "As one of the original founding Agents, you know I have seen the time-locked nameroll. I have provided a sealed testimony. Does it not make any difference here?"

Once again, Agent One didn't seem at all like he was going to budge. "It may be considered a future factor. It is certainly not necessarily a present one, and is therefore irrelevant."

She sat back down then, defeated, and Ianto knew that it was over. There was nothing he could feasibly do now. He supposed that a temporary amount of time in cryostasis was better than an indefinite sentence, at least, and this time he would be allowed to be unconscious throughout. But it wasn't exactly something he relished the thought of.

He looked again to Gray, seeing the young man's agitated expression over what had happened, and he gave him the most reassuring smile he could. The last thing he wanted was for him to think it was somehow his fault, when Ianto had made his choice, full knowing it would probably lead here.

*

"Of course, I felt responsible," Gray told his brother, sadly. "He did it all just to help me."

"They froze him?" Jack asked, carefully, all the air knocked from his lungs. A faint note of anger raged through him; how ridiculous, given everything he could do to help them. How cruel, even.

"Yes, but don't worry. It was only temporary. You see about a month later, Agent Five returned-"

*

Of all the ways Ianto had expected to be useful to the Time Agency, he hadn't expected to be taken out cryostasis to news of a viral outbreak.

Captain John was at fault, of course. Something called a Lerovitch Plague, from the Forborne Cluster. He'd picked it up on one of his pleasure planet jaunts like some sort of crazy alien STD and tracked it back. For some reason, his wristband had failed to do its usual checks on him prior to arrival so he'd had no way of knowing about it. At least, that was his story.

Although the plague itself had been dealt with fairly quickly with targeted nanogene therapies, the problem was the extreme after effects that wouldn't go away. More than half of the Time Agency were left with agonisingly enlarged sexual organs, and so Agent Six had leveraged Ianto's release based on the fact that he could fix every single one of them and restore the Time Agency to full working in barely an hour, whereas leaving things as they were would result in years of agonising surgeries for all involved.

Luckily, Agent One had contracted a particularly nasty case, leaving him with no choice but to acquiesce in the end.

Ianto couldn't exactly say it was the most fun he'd ever had, restoring private organs one by one with his hands hovering over them, like some sort of pervy faith-healing cult leader, but it was quite amusing to do it to Agent One at least. With the commanding Agent's manhood approaching the point of suffering a very nasty rupture, it had been the perfect chance for Ianto to barter his second chance at becoming a Time Agent.

Although Agent One was still very reluctant to let him out permanently, he had at least promised to consider it in order to get Ianto to hurry up before his testicles erupted.

The widespread nature of the plague across the base had had the helpful secondary effect of allowing Ianto to prove that the various minor time fissures that opened in response to his manipulations of time were not a problem. Indeed, they naturally closed themselves again on their own, as shown by all of the readings across the base. And so that was the final piece of evidence he'd needed to get Agent One to back down at last and set him free.

Ianto was given leave to begin working towards regaining his ranking, on the proviso that he submit to a barrage of experiments related to his abilities for their records, along with mental training sessions to see if he could more effectively control it, which he agreed to readily. Instead of rejoining as a trainee, however, Agent One assigned him a teaching role, challenging him to take on the training the next round of Agents. Ianto didn't have much choice, but it wasn't the worst option he supposed.

If he got all of them through, Trainee Eight included, then he would be allowed a new number designation and restored as a fully fledged Time Agent again. That was the deal.

It was a deal that he accepted.

The funniest part of this outcome, he would come to reflect, was the nickname that was given to him by his trainees, who felt, as he was a relic from the 21st century, he should have the typical title used by Time Agents for their historical assignments...

*

"Like I said, you'll have to ask the Captain," Gray said again, and pointed further along the bay front, smiling enigmatically.

Jack turned in the direction he was indicating with a measure of annoyance, certainly not in the mood to see Captain John back again to torment him. Even if he had ended up being sort of helpful to Ianto in the end, he'd still nearly killed his team with those bombs in the abandoned building. He'd still left fifteen other bombs for them to deal with. He was still very highly ranked in the list of Jack's least favourite exes of all time.

His breath caught as, instead of the red band jacket he expected to see, he caught sight of a long green velvet coat, shining radiantly emerald under the sun.

"Captain Ianto Jones," his brother clarified, enjoying his reaction as Jack span around to him with a look of amazement. "Go on, go see him," Gray laughed. "I do think he's waited long enough for this reunion."

Jack leapt up and started running along the side of bay, all coherent thought gone. He didn't even stop to say anything, sweeping Ianto up into his arms, lifting him up in his excitement.

"Captain," Ianto greeted him as he was finally set back down on his feet, grinning from ear to ear.

" _Captain_ ," Jack threw back, and then without pausing for breath, kissed him with all the fervour caused by spending two months not knowing if he'd ever see him again. The whole world could have blown up in that moment and Jack wouldn't have noticed. He didn't care who was watching, he was just so happy to have Ianto back in his arms.

Ianto was beautifully pink around the ears and neck when he let him go, and it made him want to kiss him all over again.

"Perfect," Gray said, and they both turned to the direction of his voice at the same time, surprised to discover he'd joined them and was holding up his arm so that his wristband was pointing towards them.

"Don't tell me you recorded this?" Ianto asked, with a parental tone of outrage.

"Of course. The Class of 5093 are going to want to see it." Gray pressed the side of his wristband to switch the recording off, flashing a roguish smile.

Jack couldn't help but laugh. "I wouldn't mind a copy myself."

"Oh is the real thing not good enough for you?" Ianto mock chided him.

"Not quite my meaning," Jack said, holding onto him just a little bit tighter, possibly without even realising it.

"Ianto!" a voice suddenly called from nearby, a female one.

They turned in the direction of its source, and Ianto grinned when he saw that it was Tosh. Just behind her he spotted Owen and Gwen coming towards them as well.

"Sorry, we just couldn't resist seeing if you were really here!" Tosh said, as if she was a little nervous of intruding.

"Tosh!" Ianto went to her and pulled her into a hug, genuinely happy to see her again. "Did you cut your hair?"

"Oh, yes," she said, blushing, one hand running through it.

"It suits you."

Owen moved in next, and to Ianto's surprise, he went in for a hug as well. "Good to see you, mate. Still wearing that poncey coat I see."

"Still breathing I see," Ianto countered, but he couldn't pretend he wasn't kind of glad to see him too, giving him a friendly pat on the back.

Next, Gwen moved in and enveloped him in a hug as well. "Ianto," she said, warmly, giving him a proper squeeze. "Didn't doubt you'd be here for a second."

Ianto looked at all of them in turn, the Torchwood team, a little overwhelmed but so very happy to see them again. "Oh but I'm not here alone," he said and stepped aside, inviting Jack to make an introduction of his own.

"Um, this is my brother," Jack told them, hand outstretched, a little hesitant. "This is Gray."

Gray stepped forward and shook each of their hands in turn, flashing a smile that every single one of them clearly recognised all too well.

"Now then, Agent - what is your priority assignment here?" Ianto asked, switching into his teacher voice for effect.

"Retrieve a sample of locally produced coffee for analysis, Captain. Substantiate your claim that 21st century coffee is indeed superior to future iterations."

If the team caught the title given, they didn't say anything. They were all too happy to laugh along as Ianto reiterated that it damn well was, and then invited the Torchwood team to assist them on the mission, leading to them all walking back along the Plass together to find a café.

Jack walked along with his brother, pointing out all the sights of Cardiff Bay, but every now and then he stole a glance at Ianto, his gratitude obvious.

A warm feeling settled over Ianto at that. This was it. The end of a mission that begun lifetimes ago. Because home really wasn't a place in the end; it was Jack, and had been all along.

*

"So. Here we are ag-" Jack began, as they stood outside Ianto's old flat yet again, the door unlocked with a key from his pocket.

Everything was different now and Ianto wasn't content to wait, even for him to finish his sentence. He practically leapt at Jack, the front door barely having time to close behind them before clothes were strewn about in a trail towards the bedroom.

There was none of the nervousness or hesitancy of before. Ianto knew exactly what he needed and was determined to have it. If anything, Jack was the one holding back a little, slightly fearful of things moving too fast, but Ianto simply had to reaffirm their relationship. For him, another eighteen months had been lost, and he couldn't bear another second wasted apart.

Gray had enjoyed his visit but, ultimately, he and Jack had parted amiably, with his brother promising to visit occasionally between his exciting adventures through time and space. Captain Jones, however, was not going anywhere for a while, and he wanted Jack to believe him on that, with no equivocations. If he ever did go back, it would be _with_ Jack or not at all, no matter the consequences.

The frantic note of his desire to be close to Jack only tempered when he felt him pressing inside him, their bodies gently sliding together, Ianto coming to rest on his thighs with a contented sigh. Everything slowed, Jack rocking into him, Ianto curled around him breathless and trembling. He slipped his gloves off and cast them aside, and Ianto could feel the light energy within Jack reaching to him, almost like fingers linking together.

Having had time to fully research any references to what had caused his unique ability in the Agency's extensive library, he now understood the nature of a schism in time far better. Yet there was no real explanation for his particular condition, save that sometimes people became, through happenstance or fate, indelibly woven into the fabric of universal continuance. Perhaps the Time Lords had become what they were through some similar random accident eons ago, he thought. Beyond that, Jack was the most obvious example of this fact of the universe, so intricately intertwined with the time vortex that, no matter what, his lifespan would be near inexhaustible. Ianto did not believe that he was quite so intricately connected, but he felt that some small part of him at least was threaded into the knot at the centre of time now. There was no shaking free from it, but maybe that was how it was supposed to be.

This thing they had, the sparks flying up his spine, the energy crossing back and forth between their bodies, it was a union well beyond the physical. It was daunting, just how close Ianto felt to Jack in this act, but he wanted to trust it. They'd had a lot of casual sex once upon a time, when it had been no more than a dalliance, a little bit of comfort amidst a too-often bleak existence, and this was not that.

It was like watching a golden sunset, the breeze rustling the grass, the world spinning silently below, and feeling connected to something bigger, well beyond comprehension. Ianto was both overwhelmed with the enormity and yet completely at peace with his place within it at the same time. He knew Jack was feeling it too, the way he was gazing into his eyes, his thrusts falling in time with his throaty mewls of pleasure. Ianto threw his arms around Jack's shoulders, their foreheads touching as the push and pull crescendoed towards its inevitable conclusion.

In the aftermath, they clung to one another, just breathing within the moment. Jack rested his hand on Ianto's cheek and drew him into a kiss, so soft it was almost chaste, and when it came away, there was golden light trailing with him. He showed his hand to Ianto, his expression bemused as he wiggled his fingers and the light dissipated.

"Afterglow?" Ianto muttered, smiling.

A deep seriousness came over Jack's face then. "It's the same isn't it. Whatever's in me is in you too, isn't it?"

Ianto couldn't help but chuckle into his shoulder. "About nine inches worth, yes,"

Jack rolled him aside, so that Ianto was lying down on the bed, and he gently withdrew. "Not what I meant."

"I know," Ianto conceded, and gave him an apologetic kiss. "I know what you're asking and I don't know the answer. If I get hit by a bus, or a meteor, that'll definitely be it for me, but... wrinkles, grey hair, middle age gut, I can fix. So, I won't get old on you. With a bit of luck, I won't die on you either, at least not of age-"

"Marry me?" Jack asked, so suddenly that Ianto took it for a joke at first. But from the look he gave him, it was obvious that it was being said from the heart. "Not right away. Just at some point, marry me, when you want to marry me."

"You really do have a thing for weddings." Ianto gently pulled him close to kiss into his hair. "It doesn't take a wedding to make vows," he whispered. "As they say in the future, I pledge all that I am, in dust as in light..."

"...in joy as in sorrow," Jack joined in, sounding a bit surprised that Ianto knew the words, "For you are my sea, my sand, my guiding star, and we must come together in union, for what the universe has so joined, it should never wish to part." After moment, Jack added, "And you say I'm the romantic one."

"What's the most romantic way to ask you to pound me in the mattress asap?" Ianto checked.

That patented thousand-watt smile breaking out, followed by a rumble of laughter from Jack was his reward. "Give me a few minutes and you won't have to ask," Jack said, waggling his eyebrows.

"We have time," Ianto promised, and for a moment, they locked eyes in realisation at the likely truth of that.

Jack kissed him again, and then agreed, "Aye Captain."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it folks. I really hope you enjoyed this. If you did, comments are a surefire way to brighten my day. And if you don't have time for that, a Kudos only takes a second and is appreciated.
> 
> Got more time to read? I have more Jack/Ianto stories! From 2007:
> 
> Victorian Era Time Travel Love Story [24k, M] | [The Mirror in the Morgue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28897986)  
> Time Travel Angst [12k, M] [mpreg] | [A Ray, Turned Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28899570/)  
> Evil Twin Shenanigans [10k, E] | [Ifan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28899729)  
> Dark AU Hurt/Comfort [12k, M] | [They're Still Killing Suzie](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28898610)  
> Outsider POV Mystery [8k, M] | [Random Clocks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28899876)  
> Mindbending Time Vortex Series [27k, G] | [The Aesop Fables Series](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28900332/chapters/70901193)  
> Sad AU Love Story [16k, E] | [One Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28900824)  
> Light Porny Fun [6k, E] | [Symbiosis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28900989)  
> Collaboration Kid Series [75k, M] | [The Caerleon Series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2140731)
> 
> And here are some new fics for 2021:
> 
> Ianto vs The Void [14k, T]: [The Pub on the Edge of Forever](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29588298)  
> Jack Gets a Happy Ending [2k, G]: [What will become of us now (at the end of time)?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29684646)


End file.
